it's "hear, hear". The expression Comes from the English Parliament back in the 17th century.

Now the really puzzling question is: How would someone learn about this particular saying without seeing it in writing? Are there actually people still using "hear hear" in everyday speech?

Ironically, I've have an English bachelors degree,and I've never seen it in writing before, till now! Language is active learning. There's no real way to avoiding these pitfalls, besides reading and engaging with others. I'm OK with it aslong as those offering corrections do it kindly.

I've learned German, too. German is 'difficult', not because of its grammar, but because how mistakes are handled. Which is often with harsh commentary, ridicule or confusion. Not sure why that is the case, but English speakers are often kinder when offering corrections!

> Ironically, I've have an English bachelors degree

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that was a clever and subtle joke.

As a defense I'll say this: I'm arab, grew up mostly on online and speak and write four languages. Their grammars do intertwine, and I can't help it much. my colloquialisms and vernacular are not on paar with that of a native speaker's - my academic work had a higher quality of writing due to proof reading and tight work with a thesaurus.

And it's been a while since I was a student. Cut me some slack :p

And I know I should've written 'i have' instead of 'i've' - in Arabic we say 'ill efforts blacken the face'

To disprove your last point: I'm curious as to how you achieved such a degree while using "till" as shorthand for "until". Are you sure your Bachelor's wasn't in agriculture? ;)

Joking aside, I think it's a consequence of English being a very complicated language with all sorts of borrowing from different language families. There's almost no such thing as "correct" English, and attempts to reason about it in a prescriptive rather than descriptive manner will almost certainly fail. Whether that's a good or bad thing is up for debate, but mistakes happen either way, and I reckon the average English speaker to be a bit more cognizant of that, recognizing that nobody - oneself included - really has a perfect understanding of the English language.

"Till", in fact, predates "until". http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6989/what-is-the-.... See, for example, the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer (1662): "Till death us do part".

My advice as a native English speaker here: In my entire life, I've only seen or heard "till" in the following contexts, given in order of frequency:

1 A cash register (noun)

2 In very poorly constructed resumes

3 In the farming sense (verb)

4 In internet forums alongside poorly written English

5 Shakespeare and other literature from several centuries ago.

So my advice: unless you're a time traveller, use "until".

Oh god I remember reading so much about till and until. covers face in shame

I think I even forgot the difference between conjuncts and adjuncts, too. Grammar 1/2/3 were tough courses.

I'm leagues below the level of a native speaker, I'll admit that! But I did still do a ton of reading, which did improve my English, but won't protect against common pitfalls :P it could've been worse. At least I don't make those "your" "you're" mistakes, too often :D

The British Parliament still uses it frequently, as does my Grandad. It means "Hear Him!" as in "Listen to this guy, because he's right".

It's used in Australian parliament too.

I've heard it in everyday speech, yes. I always assumed people pick it up from reading it, though.

Yes there are. If you tune into House of Commons debates they still shout "Hear, hear" from time to time as a way to indicate their support with what current speaker is saying. So in UK you can still hear this phrase used in a speech, granted not everyday speech.

Perhaps not in everyday speech, but they might hear it in a movie or a TV show.

I hear this quite frequently in day to day speech. e.g. somebody makes a proposition in a meeting and another agrees. Also - have seen this a few times in Whatsapp chats, albeit often misspelled this way (-:

Thanks for that!

Anyone who says sbt > maven should have been an egyptologist.

I get you would enjoy deciphering hieroglyphs...

Yes I do prefer XML.

XML syntax is very simple, has very good IDE support (navigation, autocompletion - thanks to xml schema, etc.. can any IDE autocomplete dependencies from repository in .sbt files?). Maven itself provides good easy ways to reuse the configuration across multiple modules.

If you exclude dependencies than for more complex projects the no of lines in pom.xml build files is somewhere between 50 - 100 % more, so it is not like .sbt (or gradle - which I find superior to both) is 10 times less verbose.

Look at play https://github.com/playframework/playframework/blob/master/f... Here is a list of few glyphs from there:

._ := () ++ ++= ]( % target := target.value / "sbt-routes-compiler",

Seriously?

At work? Definitely. It lets you do nothing for half a day while SBT is doing, well, _something_.

the sbt config has been the worth part for me. I could never fully understand the syntax (or let say API because it's scala, but really those operators ...).

Yeah there's,some magic involved in the background for sbt, but Google helps :D

sbt has a circular dependency

Care to expand on that? might save us noobs trouble down the road!

Did you actually read that?

I did :p sort of reminds me of how haskell needs itself to Compile.

Honestly, I don't see it as a problem.

That is the (build) circular dependency. OK if you are happy "downloading jars", but not if you are packaging for Debian: check the dates on this discussion https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=639910

Gnu make does not need make to build (it includes a build shell script for that), gcc can be built using any C compiler via a 3-stage bootstrap. But sbt, it seems, can only be built by sbt.

It is way simpler than that. You can specify version of sbt's jar your project needs right in your build files. When you run any against your project it will download the version you specified if different from the one installed. It is not by any means a circular dependency.