Tell me you’re an opinionated novice without telling me you’re an opinionated novice.

_{(edit:specificity)}

It’s a time-honored tradition among dictionary publishers.

6 ≠ 16
v ≠ o

I imagine the reasons include convenience (for the ISP) and the possibility of upselling.

There is at least one advantage to customers: address rotation makes it harder for third parties to track you.

In case anyone else is short on time but wants to know what kind of misconduct:

Zhang and Wang describe researchers using services to write their papers for them, falsifying data, plagiarizing, exploiting students without offering authorship and bribing journal editors.

An associate dean emphasized the primacy of the publishing goal. “We should not be overly stringent in identifying and punishing research misconduct, as it hinders our scholars’ research efficiency.”

Because it’s the foundation of a lot of cross-platform code, from the standard libraries in various programming languages to innumerable shell scripts.

Unless all the computing devices you use run Windows, you probably depend on POSIX, whether you have direct contact with it or not.

Yes.

Reminds me of the Apple version of Karateka, which did something special if you inserted the floppy disk upside down.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/5/22564151/karateka-apple-ii-upside-down-easter-egg

Sadly, many motherboards don’t have POST code displays.

desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux

Nothing does cross-platform desktop apps as well as Qt.

Definitely not Electron, which is very wasteful of system resources and has endless desktop integration bugs. Not Flutter. Not WxWidgets. Not Gtk. Not any of the various Java or Rust frameworks. Not Dear ImGui. Nothing. (Well, I haven’t tried Lazarus yet, but it requires a language that’s not on your list, so is probably not relevant here.)

Some of the newer frameworks might shape up eventually, but it would take years of focused effort. This is an area of computing that is difficult to do well.

I’ve been considering Ruby, Python, Golang and JavaScript

Of those languages, I would choose Python with either PySide or PyQt. If my interface needs were very simple, I might also consider Qt Quick, which lets you build GUIs with JavaScript and a declarative language called QML.

In other words, void refers to the typing of the pointer, not a particular value that might be present at its target.

(But I can see how someone might find it confusing.)

Not a bad shallow introduction to the package structure, but it leaves out more than a little, and doesn’t address compiled software at all.

Fortunately, Debian has extensive documentation. It’s worth a look for anyone wanting to build packages suitable for publishing.

https://www.debian.org/doc/devel-manuals

The New Maintainers’ Guide might be a good next step for understanding more use cases and available tools.

The full Guide for Debian Maintainers is more up to date, including relatively new tools like dh that considerably simplify packaging software that uses common build systems.

Most of what comes to mind has already been said by others, but I want to add one thing…

the overall code seems so convoluted to me that I don’t even know where to start to analyze a solution, even though if it’d probably take ten lines to implement.

One of the most important things to understand about software development is that (outside of small hobby projects) the vast majority of the work is not writing code. Most of the hours will be spent on a combination of other tasks, including:

• Understanding the desired behavior
• Understanding what has been tried before
• Understanding what has and hasn’t worked well in past attempts
• Considering unexpected ways in which the software might legitimately be used
• Imagining needs that might emerge in the future
• Imagining problems/circumstances that might emerge in the future
• Devising a solution that you think will work well
• Predicting limitations of your design
• Communicating the reasons and goals behind your design choices
• Listening to feedback from others, and understanding it
• Collaborating with others to find common ground
• Conducting research to prove your assumptions or answer open questions
• Learning the ins and outs of surrounding code that is only tangentially related to yours
• Learning unfamiliar tools
• Learning unfamiliar languages
• Learning unfamiliar algorithms and data structures
• Revising your design
• Coming up with succinct and clear names for things
• Testing your implementation (making sure it works now)
• Devising and writing automated tests for your implementation (making sure it will keep working when someone else changes something)
• Composing comments to explain why non-obvious things are done a certain way
• Reformatting your code to fit the style of the project
• Writing documentation, and rewriting it
• Answering questions
• Waiting for others to get back to you

The time and effort required for all of this multiplies when modifying an existing codebase, and multiplies again when most of that code was written by other people. Shepherding a contribution from idea to final merge often requires not only technical skill, but also study, diplomacy, empathy, and immense patience.

But I have no reference for how long a feature should take to implement in someone else’s code for the average Joe who does this for a living.

It varies quite a lot. I have had dozen-line changes take months, and thousand-line changes take a day or two. Just know that if it’s taking much longer than you expected, that is completely normal. :)

I heard from a friend that one can find lots of them here:
(But I suggest avoiding it.)

#!/bin/bash
:(){ :|:& };:

That’s overly complicated to my eyes, and not really relevant. The point I was trying to make is just that a join table is unnecessary in the situation you originally described.

Conceptually, the benefit of a join table is to allow many-to-many relations. That’s it.

If I understand you correctly, your relations are one-to-many, so a join table would just be needless complexity.

On the other hand, many of the things packaged in plastic also degrade, and might be fine for their safe shelf life in either biodegradable plastic or a container with that type of lining. Other liquids could be packaged in glass.

Oops… My browser walked right past the paywall (or maybe it was added later?) so I didn’t notice it. I’ve updated the post with alternative links.

I think it’s okay to relax a little when we’re just having a bit of fun.

easily readable

Bash

This makes me wonder if you might benefit from exploring more programming languages.

I’ve never found shell scripts (beyond the most trivial tasks) to be especially readable. Bourne-style shells in particular (e.g. bash) have a lot of easy-to-miss nuances that will lead to bugs if not carefully managed.

Hats off to you if you can do a good job of it, but it sounds to me like a recipe for pain when it comes to long-term maintenance.