Yeah, you understood my comment entirely the wrong way around. When I say “dotfiles”, I mean the non-Nix way of managing application configurations. Nix Home-Manager happens to write to these dotfiles, but that means I don’t have to deal with the dotfiles myself.

I feel like setting up a new machine is just the easiest to explain.

Personally, I find dotfiles messy, as you often just want to change one or two settings, but you always carry along the whole file with all kinds of irrelevant other settings. This also makes it impractical to diff two versions of those dotfiles, especially when programs write semi-permanent settings into there.

I guess, your mileage will vary depending on what programs or desktop environment you use.
For example, I love KDE, but they really don’t do a good job keeping the config files clean. Nix Plasma-Manager generally fixes that, and for example allows defining the contents of the panel in a readable form.

Personally, the stepping stone I needed to know about is Nix Home-Manager, which basically allows you to manage your dotfiles independent of the distro. From what I understand, if I do switch to NixOS, I’ll continue using this code with just some minor tweaks.

But yeah, I agree with the verdict in the post. I like it a lot, but I would not have made it past the initial learning curve, if I didn’t happen to be a software engineer. Sysadmins will probably be able to figure out how to put it to use, too. But it’s just not for non-technical Linux users.

Proper ants only have 6 legs, though. But yeah, these spiders-turned-to-ants would have 8 legs.

Well, and crabs technically have 10 legs, with their foremost pair typically equipped with pincers. 🙃

It looks like a guitar pick to me. 🙃

I don’t think, it’s open-source…

This does not look to be open-source. The webpage lists open-source licenses for the libraries used by this app, but there’s no open-source license for the app itself.
And while there’s a GitHub repo, it’s empty. It seems to be used just for hosting the APK files.

An open-source app with decent editing capabilities is Fossify Gallery: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fossify.gallery/

Yeah, after writing that comment, I was thinking, if I do promote it, that means there’s a certain expectation that I’ll integrate or implement functionality that others want. At that point, it becomes less of an egoistic thing. And I’ll be doing more communication and whatnot, therefore less programming.

Maybe that’s the puzzle piece that OP is missing? If you don’t promote it, you have practically no extra work compared to developing it under a proprietary license. In fact, it often reduces the workload, if you can just post it publicly without having to secure the repo.
And you don’t incur costs from giving it away either. So, if you make sure to only put in the work that you want to put in in the first place, you have no disadvantage from publishing it with an open-source license.

Many people enjoy programming, you know. I’ve got like ten reasonably-sized projects and I haven’t posted about them anywhere. Because I built them to scratch my own itch, both in terms of functionality I could use and the itch to build something, no matter what it is. I’m not wasting my time, because I’m doing something I enjoy.

Yeah, it’s great. Farmers need to use pesticides and monocultures to stay competitive, since other farmers are using them. Also, pesticides and monocultures kill the ecosystems that provide things like natural pest control, pollination and humus. So, you probably don’t get an increased yield from pesticides and monocultures when they’re employed in wide areas, while you do still get the destruction of ecosystems.

It’s the same thing as ternary, just without the ? : syntax.

Oh yeah, I’m in favor of using type hints. People here are also saying that Pyright is more useful, which I haven’t used yet.

I was involved as the unlucky bastard supposed to sprinkle software engineering on top of a Python project 2+ years ago, and I just remember how much I understood right then and there why Python devs thought static typing was cumbersome. Felt like I had to write Java again, except it also didn’t work half the time.

Interesting. If it’s only in the type checker, can IDEs/editors correctly show the type information of inferred types then? Do they call the type checker themselves to retrieve that info?

Yeah, I only used Mypy so far. I thought it was inherent to the language spec, not the type checker.

I guess, some of your colleagues might have also just used Mypy so far, though…

In the case of Rust, you can also omit the type annotation in the vast majority of cases and the compiler will infer it.

It feels more solid to have a complex program covered by tests, yes, but how can this be confirmed in an objective way? And if it can, for which kind of software is this valid? Are the same methodologies adequate for web programming as for industrial embedded devices or a text editor?

Worth noting here that tests should primarily serve as a (self-checking) specification, i.e. documentation for what the code is supposed to do.
The more competent your type checking is and the better the abstractions are, the less you need to rely on tests to find bugs in the initial version of the code. You might be able to write code, fix the compiler errors and then just have working code (assuming your assumptions match reality). You don’t strictly need tests for that.

But you do need tests to document what the intended behaviour is and conversely which behaviours are merely accidental, so that you can still change the code after your initial working version.
In particular, tests also check the intended behaviour of all the code parts you might not have realized you’ve changed, so that you don’t need to understand the entire codebase every time you want to make a small change.

To be fair, Python doesn’t have type inference, so the type hints are quite obnoxious, and the type checkers for Python are also not as reliable as in languages with native static typing (even if that is often caused by libraries not providing type hints).

Those Spectacle changes look good. The old UI made some amount of sense, if the primary use-case was taking complete screenshots, but even for that, there’s probably a single shortcut to do that directly.
And I do find, I generally want a smaller cutout these days, because you can just fit more stuff onto modern displays, some of which is going to irrelevant.

I think, that’s not a coral, but rather a dead tree next to a stream…

Yeah, the wording is confusing. A long time ago, there was no paid software, there was only software where you got the source code and other software where e.g. it was pre-installed on some hardware and the manufacturer didn’t want to give the source code.

In that time, a whole movement started fighting for software freedom, so they called their software “free”.