throwaway4007

I assure you that drawish games are only boring on the part of the spectators, not on the part of the players. People often struggle epically to catch that half-point, it doesn't feel boring at all when playing from the inside. There are many records of epic draws between titans where both sides played incredibly accurately - see Alekhine - Reti or Korchnoi - Topalov off the top of my mind.

And as I said, people rarely if ever prepare openings 'dozens of moves' deep at all but the absolute top level play.

At this point you have to choose if you want chess to cater to competitive chess players (who are mostly content with the rules as they are) or amateur spectators and organizes (who want to see blood).

No. More likely, Arabs are more diverse in appearance than you think.

People have been wailing about chess being dry and full of draws and memorized openings for a century now. Capablanca wanted to swap bisbops and knights to reset opening theory, and Fischer wanted to just randomize the starting positions. I'm probably missing some other people.

All of these attempts failed, because of several reasons:

1) The aforementioned problem of memorizing openings and accumulating draws only occurs at a very, very high level. Even if you're a GM you won't prepare at the level Carlsen et al. do, memorizing entire 30-move games they had against each other twelve years ago.

2) Opening theory moves on and playstyles evolve. AlphaZero shifted the mood from conservative, materialistic, 'computer-like' play to a highly dynamic style that puts an emphasis on piece activity. Just like when we think we got most things figured out, new breakthroughs show we've only barely scratched the surface of what the game has to offer.

3) Most chess players don't see the abundance of draws as a problem. I think it is specifically an American sentiment - in a country where you're either a winner or a loser, the game's failure to rank its top players can be frustrating.

4) Most players see preparation against their opponent as part of competitive play. Think of it as a kind of metagaming. Changing the rules would completely reset that.

5) There's a good chance that any change of rules would aggravate White's marginal first-move advantage. It doesn't matter what the computer says, what matters is how humans play it and how it reflects in the winrates among humans.

That doesn't mean the variants are bad or useless though. Bughouse and suicide chess are crazy fun

I still don't understand why the Python steering committee decided to switch to this format for package configuration instead of the perfectly serviceable and existing setup.cfg. Packaging is already a pain to setup, now you gotta learn three (3) different ways to do it (if only to translate from one to the next) because everyone's split. The choice doesn't even matter very much, just settle on something whatever it is

I am making two points:

-Arguing that adding a feature is ok because "R does it" is comically wrong when one is acquainted with all of R's warts and superfluous stuff

-Not even the R world uses that feature either, so we have actual empirical evidence that it's not that helpful to developers.

You would be wrong. There's strong evidence that it does make sense, among which that it respects Zipf's law.

Inventing hypothetical scenarios where you are right isn't as strong an argument as you think it is. In the real world, a few people have too damn money and spend it in absolutely frivolous ways while millions of other people are being bankrupted.

It seems the opinionated, directive "there's only one way to do it" approach is winning over the hacking around, "wrapping around your mind" approach. Lisp and Perl have had their times under the sun, now it's all about Python and Go. Perhaps these things are cyclical.

>R language also has a similar way of doing this 42 -> age.

Ah yes, the R language, a model of clarity, beauty and lightness in the world of programming languages. Truly an example to follow.

(And it's not like anyone ever uses that "feature" in the R world either.)

R has always been relevant and isn't going away any time soon. The language is ugly and flawed and has a bunch of quirks and gotchas but there are just too many libs.

Also for a lot of people R is going to be the first and often only language they're going to learn because they have no use for programming outside of statistical analyses and it's damn practical for that single use. Right now generations of students are being taught in R, right now bioconductor is booming and being added to everyday. That stupid arrow assignment operator has plenty of good years ahead of it.

I was honestly blown out of the water discovering ggplot2 after years of matplotlib, and a bit infuriated that I didn't make the effort to get into R sooner.

But I want ggplot to do magic. Rendering things is extremely tedious and boring. I don't want to spend hours on stackoverflow searching for the special obscure incantations that will shift the legend and margins this way because matplotlib did an ugly job while constantly adapting boilerplate back and forth between the declarative and object-oriented API, I want it to just do what I mean!

Is there any coincidence that there are literally tens of different (and concurrent) rendering libraries for Python while the R world more or less settled for ggplot2? Writing matplotlib is such a pain in the ass that people go to great lengths to actually avoid using matplotlib (while still not having the expressivity, features and ease of use of ggplot2).

Magic is bad when you're shipping production code that's shared among multiple people who have to then spend a lot of time assimilating the mental model of the magic. It's perfect when you just want to plot stuff and draw nice figures.

I was super into TDD and never thought that there was such a thing as "TDD going too far" until I read that post by an ex-Oracle employee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

Why is this flagged? I found the article interesting and relatively well-balanced.