Consider the possibility that the leak of the Alito decision might not have anything to do with Roe v Wade. It might be the work of a Putinite wanting to distract attention from the atrocities they're committing in Ukraine.#
The Supreme Court protects the rights of Americans. They’re not a religious body, they are not chartered to adjudicate religious questions, because there is no religion attached to our government. That part is in the text of the Constitution, for our textualist friends.#
I wrote: "I don’t envy the Bluesky people. Everyone is watching with great expectation and they’ve bit off the problem of federating a closed system that has been built over sixteen years."#
My friend Jeff Jarvis wrote: "I will admit that I am pinning hopes on bluesky." I know. #
I responded: "Software takes time. Replicating the functionality of a system that’s huge in complexity and scale while changing its underlying design, think about any other field, imagine rebuilding the NYC subway in a year or two with one of the basic constraints changed. People expect miracles of software mostly because they don’t understand how it’s made but it’s pretty much like everything else, if it took a long time to make it the first time it’s going to take almost as much time the second and that’s assuming you’re cloning it."#
My response -- I do leave big code comments, and it's not painful because I use an outliner, and do it carefully and consistently. There's a big comment the top of each major routine, it’s like a blog, with reverse chronologic notes about each major change. At the end of the list in the first comment is an explanation of what it does, params, etc. And since it’s in an outliner, it’s all collapsed until you need to read it.#
Here's a read-only outline listing of oldschool.js, the CMS that renders this blog. If you scroll down to publishBlog and expand it, you'll see a Changes sub-outline. Expand it to see the changes, and under each change are notes.#
This format goes all the way back to the 90s believe it or not when we started coding in an outliner in Frontier. It's the way to organize internal docs. And yes they are absolutely necessary if you plan to maintain and build on the code. #
Last update: Wednesday May 4, 2022; 7:34 PM EDT.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)
