This Week in D

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 1 December 2015 at 16:18:37 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
> Judging by who is labeled an SJW, I'm one, and mentioning the 
> existence of trans people in a context where their existence is 
> relevant is sufficient to be labeled an SJW.

Really? That sounds bad, hopefully this will pass. Sounds like 
the trans people are going through the same process as the gays 
did before them. People who have problems with it probably have 
some uncertainty about their own identity at some level.

> As for judging a programming language in three seconds...that's 
> a bad analysis of the situation. I left Nim in part because 
> Araq was, shall we say, less than friendly.

Oh well, but Araq is a mild breeze compared to the D citizens!!! 
There are plenty of people here that like to show off and prefer 
to go through the roof rather than having someone kindly bring 
them back to earth...

But some of us are very reasonable!! Like I decided not to hit 
you back for wrongly claiming that my "O(N)" should have been 
"O(infinity)" and that unqualified "big-oh" usually means 
"average complexity" (when lazy comp sci people use unqualified 
big-oh it always means worst case :-) But since I am going there 
anyway: average complexity analysis isn't something you can do on 
the back of a napkin, first you have to define a model for the 
input, then you have to transform it into something that can be 
dealt with, like a recurrence relation, then an integral that you 
solve analytically etc. So if it common for people around you to 
talk about average complexity analysis a lot then they probably 
have no idea what they are talking about. Average complexity is 
mostly of academic interest (publish or perish!) and insanely 
boring. In fact it is so boring, that the professor who taught 
the topic on my university started the lecture series by saying 
"I am sorry to say this, but this topic is very boring. I wish I 
could say that it will become better as we progress through this 
course, but it won't. It will remain boring throughout."

In the time it takes to do an average analysis of algorithm you 
can implement and benchmark it many times with much more useful 
results. So the next time you meet someone who boasts about their 
average analysis skills... be highly sceptical, they are probably 
bluffing. :^)

I guess this was off topic.