Pretty much all languages do that. It’s a very basic language feature inherited from basic maths notation. Same as x - y subtracts y from x in pretty much any language that supports operators.

Totally, yes. I guess there’s a ton of non-programmers and total beginners in this community.

But sometimes there are some crazy good programmers here as well.

What’s really weird though is that I got two downvotes a bit further up for claiming that unary minus is a standard language feature.

It never occurred to me that you could assign fields to a function. I mean, it totally makes sense considering that functions are objects in Python. It just never occurred to me that this is a thing one can do. Crazy.

Thanks, I totally missed your sarcasm :)

There’s a couple people in this threat who seem to actually think that x = -i is some weird magic instead of a standard feature that’s present in every major programming language.

Works fine in any language I ever used.

I’m honestly quite surprised that this very basic language feature is even a matter of discussion here.

Nope, it is not.

x = 5
i = 2
x -= i // x => 3

while

x = 5
i = 2
x = -i // x => -2

x=-i is the unary minus operator which negates the value right of it. It doesn’t matter if that value is a literal (-3), a variable (-i) or a function (-f()).

x-=i is short for x = x-i, and here it’s a binary subtraction, so x is set to the result of i subtracted from x.

Find me a language where it doesn’t work like that, and we’ll continue the discussion.

Unary minus operator is standard in every single language that I used so far, including C/C++, Java, Python, Kotlin, Lua, JS/TS, Groovy, PHP, Visual Basic, Excel, Mathematica, Haskell, Bash.

Here’s more info btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_operation

Yeah, generating test classes with AI is super fast. Just ask it, and within seconds it spits out full test classes with some test data and the tests are plenty, verbose and always green. Perfect for KPIs and for looking cool. Hey, look at me, I generated 100% coverage tests!

Do these tests reflect reality? Is the test data plausible in the context? Are the tests easy to maintain? Who cares, that’s all the next guy’s problem, because when that blows up the original programmer will likely have moved on already.

Good tests are part of the documentation. They show how a class/method/flow is used. They use realistic test data that shows what kind of data you can expect in real-world usage. They anticipate problems caused due to future refactorings and allow future programmers to reliably test their code after a refactoring.

At the same time they need to be concise and non-verbose enough that modifying the tests for future changes is simple and doesn’t take longer than the implementation of the change. Tests are code, so the metric of “lines of code are a cost factor, so fewer lines is better” counts here as well. It’s a big folly to believe that more test lines is better.

So if your goal is to fulfil KPIs and you really don’t care whether the tests make any sense at all, then AI is great. Same goes for documentation. If you just want to fulfil the “every thing needs to be documented” KPI and you really don’t care about the quality of the documentation, go ahead and use AI.

Just know that what you are creating is low-quality cost factors and technical debt. Don’t be proud of creating shitty work that someone else will have to suffer through in the future.

Why would they not let you do that? I honestly don’t know a single language that wouldn’t let you do that. Same as basic math notation allows you to do that.

x = -i

is a totally valid mathematical equation.

For the downvoters: Find me a single language that supports operators but doesn’t have an unary minus operator

It’s got a reckognizable name and first party support from an actual company.

This.

The one step that would really push a lot would be if you can go to your local electronics store and buy a PC there with Linux preinstalled and completely setup, just like you can with Windows, Mac and ChromeOS.

That’s why the Steam Deck actually pushed the Linux market share quite a bit.

I mean, there is a thing like that and it’s called Chromebooks, but we, the tech people, deemed ChromeOS not Linux enough and told everyone not to buy chromebooks.

But still ChromeOS is by far the most popular Linux distro with about 5x the market share of the next most popular Linux distro (which is Arch, thanks to the Steam Deck).

Really difficult to actually get good numbers here since there’s a ton of sampling bias and user agent strings (which are used for most of these market share detectors) don’t capture Linux distros apart from ChromeOS.

But we can combine sources to get somewhere.

The Steam Hardware and Software Survey doesn’t include any data on ChromeOS, because there’s no Steam on ChromeOS, but it says that there’s a total market share for Linux of 3.2% with the most common Linux Distro being Arch with a market share of 0.32% (probably due to the Steam Deck), followed by Mint with 0.24%.

So double the maket share to get roughly to the 6.3% total Linux maket share from PH, and we get Arch with 0.64% and Mint with 0.48%, which is both much much lower than the 2.4% of ChromeOS on PH.

Well, all Linux distros combined are more than ChromeOS. If you split up by distro, ChromeOS is still the top Linux distro by far.

Successful compared to what? I don’t have data, but I’d venture to say that it’s the most popular desktop Linux distro.

It’s a bit past its peak, but in 2023 it had 7% market share in the quite lucrative North American market. That’s not nothing. In North America, all other Linux distros combined just overtook ChromeOS this year. World-wide it was last year.

There’s also no other Linux distro that comes pre-installed on devices from different manufacturers (at least none that I know of).

If you look at the commercially successful variants of Linux (ChromeOS and Android), you’ll see that taking away freedom/choice was the first thing they did.

And ultimately, if you are targeting the mass market, that’s almost required.

BSD, Haiku and pretty much anything that hides or manipulates the user agent string.

From the title I expected the opposite result.

Sounds like the network people at my company. They are asking us to spend more time in the office, but they don’t provide enough desks, they don’t provide working wired LAN and they only provide semi-working Wifi. All with proxies that don’t work and filters that don’t let me access the webapp I am supposed to maintain, which is blocked for “being a commercial website”. Thanks, I know, I have to program that crap.

Hmm, partially. One real thing that I see now is cloud costs. All of the stuff we now have in our pipeline does inflate our costs quite a bit, which then puts pressure on the budget and that crunches everywhere.

Didn’t specify. Good luck!