Far as Swift’s syntax goes, I really like argument labels too, but it’s just that there’s SO. MUCH. SYNTAX. Lots of sugar, yes, but sometimes that’s part of the problem in my opinion, because it often adds to the syntactic and semantic “noise.” Also, there’s 98 keywords (more if you count eg. try, try! and try? as different keywords, and this count is missing eg. sending and other new keywords) – compare this to say Rust’s or or Python’s 35. Java’s got 68, while C++ also has 98 and it’s notorious for having way too many of them. And then there’s all the symbols – some of which have different meanings in different contexts.

It’s true that ARC only applies to reference types, but even with value types you can often get some fairly surprising performance problems due to implicit copies, for example in getters and setters – and the _read and _modify accessors that can sometimes help with that due to returning (well, yielding) a borrowed value instead of a copy aren’t meant for “public” use (which doesn’t mean many libraries etc. don’t use them, much to the consternation of core devs).

Urr, I don’t think that’s it. I’m not sure stereo sound for vinyls has ever worked so that something like this would be necessary, and it wouldn’t really make sense – why would they have to put vocals on one channel and instruments on the other?

A stereo vinyl player just has the needle moving up and down in addition to left and right, so that the left-right axis is the sum of the waveforms of both channels and the up-down axis is the difference – which means that a regular mono player can play stereo vinyls

Swift is… not a great language. It’s got some promise but goddamn does it have a “designed by committee” feel to it; they just keep throwing on features like they’re going out of fashion and it’s getting ridiculously complex. Just the syntax alone is a bit of a nightmare – soooo many keywords and symbols. It’s also extremely hard to predict how well Swift code will perform, in large part due to ARC (automatic reference counting) memory management, which is a huge downside for game development. And don’t even get me started on the new concurrency stuff…

Just as a side note, it’s not purely an Apple project nowadays. They’re still the “project lead” but it’s not exclusively theirs anymore. Still, regardless of that, at least personally I really couldn’t recommend it especially to someone looking to get into game development.

If OP’s not from the US, turkey might not be an option – it’s not very common in a lot of places here in Europe for example.

Might be an option to just buy cat food (after they recover from their injury) and hide it in their room if the stepmom is that controlling

Gah, honestly I’m not surprised at all she’s like that, she sounds exactly like the type.

Holy crap, that’s sounds outright abusive

That’s known as a ligature and they’re pretty common in many programming-oriented fonts, which usually have stylistic sets with different ligatures for different programming languages that you can optionally enable in your editor’s configuration. For example, here’s the stylistic sets the Monaspace font offers:

Personally I’m not too fond of ligatures so I never enable any, but many folks do like them.

Edit: and just as a side note, ligatures are super common in many fonts, you just might not notice them. Here’s some classic examples from the DejaVu Serif font, with and without a ligature:

"A".reverse() == "∀"

Where is your god now?!

Use a dynamically typed language and you won’t have to: just override the default reverse() method on strings like a Real Programmer!

Unintended consequences you say? Nonsense! What could possibly go wrong?

This is absolutely true, but it still seems to me that we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water when we just stick to extremely terse symbols for everything regardless of context.

Reading articles would be so much easier if they used even slightly longer names – thankfully more and more computer science articles do tend to use more human readable naming nowadays, at least.

Sure, longer names make manipulation harder a bit more annoying if you’re doing it by hand, but if you do need to manipulate something you can then abbreviate the terms (and I’m 60% sure I’ve seen some papers that had both a longer form and a shorter form for terms, so one for explaining shit and one for the fiddly formal stuff)

Of course using terse terms is totally fine when it’s clear from the context what eg. ∆x means.

PleasrDAO, NFT collective and current owner of Shaolin

So everybody involved in this lawsuit is an asshole?

Ah, I managed to completely miss the last part of the comment because I’m an eejit who can’t read good

In 2017 his name was mentioned as a visionary comparable to the Wright Brothers and Zefram Cochrane (inventor of the warp drive) on a Star Trek episode set in the 2250s.

By a character who was explicitly evil and whose judgement we were not meant to trust, though

It’s always great fun when people who have absolutely zero fucking clue how something works declare it “stupid”.

I’m a climber (or used to be at any rate) so that thought doesn’t really bother me, it’s more how the building looks like it’d snap in half from a particularly strong gust of wind

Heh, he was thankfully nowhere near as nuts as Orbán.

As far as autocrats go, his rule could definitely have been much worse – we stayed independent from the USSR, no fucked up secret police hunting down dissidents, the press was free-ish except for anything negative related to Russia (they basically had their boot on our neck and we had to “behave” or they’d invade us again like the good neighbors they are), and so on.

Having a “president for life” isn’t exactly optimal, but since I had to grow up in a country with an autocratic leader I’m glad it was Kekkonen and not fucking Brezhnev or Tito.

This building gives me anxiety

The current prez Alexander Stubb is a pretty run of the mill “fiscal conservative” just like our last one. He’s at least not outright sympathetic to Nazis, but his party – the National Coalition – is more or less indistinguishable from the extremist right wing “Finns Party”. The joke is that the only way to tell the National Coalition MPs apart from the Finns Party MPs is that they wear more expensive suits.

Thankfully the president doesn’t have much power anymore, thanks to a… uh… dictator we had 50-ish years ago (Urho Kekkonen. It’s complicated, heh.) Naturally conservatives want to expand presidential powers, because of course they fucking do.

About 3 and a half years, out of a term of 4 years…

And yeah, it’s pretty fucking bad. This “person” is our new Speaker of the Parliament:

And trust me, those aren’t even the worst of his outbursts I could dig up. Halla-aho is also a fan of the right-wing mass murderer Breivik, who coincidentally is also one of Halla-aho’s fans and Breivik even mentions him in his “manifesto” as one of his idols.

They also defunded our Security and Intelligence Service because they said that right-wing terrorism is our most pressing security issue considering that we keep arresting neo-Nazi terrorists. It’s only a matter of time until we have our own Utøya moment here, and conservatives are actively working towards making that happen.

It so is.

Here in Finland we have multiple literal neo-Nazis in the government. Well, one of them was forced to resign from his ministerial post for being a neo-Nazi, so our extremist right wing government replaced him with a pedophile neo-Nazi and somehow that’s been totally fine 🤦‍♀️