I’ve noticed an interesting development in my coding lately. In PHP, the language I write in for the most part, strings can single quotes (‘) or double quotes (“). Double quotes allow you to include variables in the string and the value of the variable will be substituted in the output. Single quotes will give you the exact characters you put in the string, including outputting the name of variables, not their values. The codebase I work in is the same codebase I learned to program with about 5 years ago and I’m still living with a lot of old choices I made then. For example, I almost never used single quotes for strings, because sometimes I wanted to put in a variable that I wanted to value of.
Today, as a result of becoming a better programmer over the last five years, I am pretty capable of using the appropriate quotes in differing contexts. In fact, I’ve noticed that the better I get, the more troubled I am by even little things like inappropriate quotes for strings. I don’t think that using double quotes for a simple string is too big of a performance hit, but it has become almost a cognitive hit for me. I also get little hits when I see old loops that are inefficient, badly formatted code, and the like. None of which is really affecting the bottom line of the website. But I’m noticing that as I get better at the big stuff, my brain is learning to be picky about even the smallest stuff.
175 million people is far more than the number of people who voted in the 2008 US presidential election (131,257,328). It’s far more than the population of Mexico (111,211,789). It is far larger than the nation with the second largest national economy on Earth, Japan(127,530,000). And it’s still growing like crazy. Facebook, of course, is not really comparable to a country, but at some point the size of a community becomes a very important feature.
When it came to the notorious split infinitive (e.g., “to boldly go where no man . . .”), [Fowler] observed that those English speakers who neither know nor care about them “are to be envied” by the unhappy few who do.
Certainly, any grammatical advice that goes up against Star Trek, deserves what it gets. Somehow Fowler understood that, decades before anyone met Captain Pike, never mind Kirk.
John McCormack of the Weekly Standard fell Tuesday night as he tried to speak with the Democrat while simultaneously videotaping her and trying to pass a metal grate on a Washington sidewalk.
It’s hard to describe that as anything other than sheer abridgment of the freedom of the press. An unfriendly reporter was asking questions of a candidate and someone working for the candidate assaulted the reporter. I mean, what else is there? The Boston Globe is happy to edit history’s first draft in this case and YouTube is here to provide the second draft.
Ultimately, this incident isn’t about an election, or partisan politics. It’s about a fundamental American value that is being ignored by the Coakley Campaign (and the guy is definitely with the campaign). Americans want a free and functioning press. We want tabloid journalism and Pulitzer Prize journalism. We want to hear lies and we want to see journalists expose the truth. We don’t want to see some flack assault a journalist and we certainly don’t want to see other journalists covering it up. That is just as much against American values as police protecting themselves by arresting innocent cellphone videographers.
We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. – The Official Google Blog
Good for Google! As an American, I grew up with a pretty steady drumbeat of praise for free speech. It’s not easy for me to think of many values that resonate with me as strongly and as clearly as freedom of speech. And so I’m very happy to see Google withdrawing from their arrangement with the Chinese government. Freedom is the ultimate complementary good.
My name is Bill Sullivan and I’m a software developer living in Austin, TX. I’ve previously lived in the Boston area (where I grew up) and Colorado Springs, CO. I’m married to Kari Sullivan.
