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What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on? (programming.dev)

submitted 3 months ago by notnotmike@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

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[-] Birch@sh.itjust.works 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Commas don't belong in numbers, not as a thousands separator and definitely not as a decimal point.

Also ISO8601 and that dark theme should be the default

[-] Vedlt@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

What do you use as a thousands separator then?

I'm mostly unfamiliar with different systems than the standard comma for thousands and period for decimal. I've seen period used for thousands before, but in that case how does one differentiate between a thousands period and a decimal period?

[-] _edge@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

1'000.00

1 000.00

1'000,00

1 000,00

work without confusing anyone.

While 1.000 or 1,000 can be read as 1 or 1000.

[-] BaumGeist@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

spaces work fine for natural language, but what about regular languages. How should a programming language parse something like

x = 1 234

Sure that works fine in whitespace agnostic languages, but in something like shell script, it could mean "1,234" or ["1", "234"] (currently, it would be the latter). In a functional language (e.g. Haskell) it would also be parsed as 2 separate numbers.

[-] tastysnacks@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago

Spaces?!?! What are we, animals?

[-] Fallenwout@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Simple, don't use a thousand separator. One thousand and a half would be 1000.5

[-] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

This is fine for numbers that only have one separator. But they get difficult to read when they get longer. No reasonable person can read 957245815627 and functionally parse it in their minds. Can you tell at a glance, without counting digits that the number is nine trillion? Ninety billion? Nine hundred billion? You could be off by entire orders of magnitude and not even realize it until you stop and count the individual digits.

Breaking it up into 957,245,815,627 helps the user visually see the hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions the same way we use them in language. The comma is a stand-in for the place descriptor. 957(billion)245(million)815(thousand)627. So now your brain can easily parse that there are 245 millions in this number, instead of accidentally seeing 724 or 458.

[-] Birch@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 months ago

A comma here could also be parsed as a vector, an apostrophe has never been used in numbers as anything other than a thousand separator. Well, except as the transpose command in Matlab... or to indicate a character vector... fuck. Just use scientific notation or spell it out for large numbers.

[-] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 months ago

Doesn't ISO8601 prefer the comma over the decimal point for fractional seconds? I kind of remember being appalled about that some years back when I was looking into it.

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024

472 points (98.2% liked)

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