I don't think what Pascal is trying to get through is that we should numb ourself to inner thoughts. On the contrary, to acknowldege them and if anything, spend more time contemplating. That is when we can learn about ourself, others, and the universe, if I may say.
Working from home this entire year, I have tried to practice taking at least 15 minutes everyday, couple of times a day, laying down and just listening to my thoughts, understanding my anxieties. Trying to understand why I feel the way I do, instead of running away from them by distracting myself by various means.
This new habit of mine truly has been a life saver in this year.
Pascal is throwing light and expounding upon a weakness found in (most) people, that of depending on distractions to prevent themselves from dwelling on thoughts which remind them of their mortal nature.
I didn't read his works enough, none apart from the above quote in fact, to comment on whether or not he recommends acknowledging our inner thoughts and contemplating on them.
As for me, I feel real and lasting relief from worshipping Allaah. It's something very tangible and enlightening. It might seem counterintuitive, but it does boost my productivity a lot, even though I ignore thinking about work during prayer.
Now, having belief in Allaah has its manifest benefits. I am happy as I write this. I am able to keep afloat a bit in trying times. I was able to come out of depression (and quite a few other mental illnesses). None of it I could achieve except by Allaah's help.
When I used to go to hospital for psychiatric treatment, the doctor used to advise me that whenever I feel anxious, I lie down on a bed, relax and think of some beautiful place, in order to ward off the bad feelings. So, even the best advice the doctor could give me was this.
And what better place to think of than Paradise?
What Pascal was explicit in saying is that there is no inherent happiness in material possessions. But if you know that there is a life after death, that there is a Paradise and a Hell, that there is a Merciful God who, if you believe in Him and obey Him, will reward you for you good deeds and forgive your bad deeds, you will be humble, you will be hopeful, and you will be happy.
"the Paradise I am talking about, you don't die after entering it"
Not every religion considers eternal life desirable. In some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, the ultimate goal is to leave the cycle of death and rebirth.. not in to paradise, but in to nothingness.
The truly vast amount of literature on both Buddhism and Hinduism argue to the contrary.
Also, the ultimate reality in Buddhism, Hinduism, and (incidentally) mystic forms of Islam, is often described as being beyond words and even beyond conception, so there is a limited amount that could be said about it in ordinary language -- though that hasn't stopped people from trying.
In Buddhism one often hears the teachings described as the finger pointing towards the moon. Language may be inadequate to describe ultimate reality, but it can point to it.
As a Muslim, I can assure you there’s no such thing as mystic Islam. Islam is foremost about clarity, simplicity and straightforwardness in its message of pure monotheism. It does not seek to lure people by mesmerising them with incomprehensible riddles. It hides nothing.
The so called mystic Islam also known as Sufism, is a deviant sect, and is fundamentally a gateway to polytheism, as it borrows many practices from polytheistic religions. In fact, many of the famous ancient sufis have roots in India, where paganism and idol worshipping was and is still prevalent. Hence sufis are adored by Hindus.
Who decides what orthodox Islam and what is heresy?
You'll find Sunnis who think Shiites are heretics, and Shiites who think Sunnis are heretics, and both are major branches of Islam.
Of course you'll find both Sunnis and Shiites who think Sufis are heretics, and Sufis who think Sunnis and Shiites are heretics (or at least don't understand the true or secret meaning of the Koran or of Islam).
And does the Koran have a secret meaning, or only a surface meaning? This important question itself is also a matter of opinion and will differ based on who you ask.
There have also been mystics in Islam apart from the Sufis: Avicenna, the Ismailis, and Alawites spring to mind.
As a non-Muslim, when I see the members of these sects disagree with one another as to who is a "true Muslim" or what is or isn't Islam, what reason do I have for believing any one of them over the others?
Their appeals to scripture, lineage, famous commentators and the like are not very convincing both because as a non-Muslim I have no reason to believe in any of them and because you can easily find other people who claim to be Muslims making pretty much the same appeals in support of completely different conclusions.
At this point in my life, anyone who considers the Koran their central scripture is a Muslim in my eyes.
If you have a better definition that doesn't rely on appeals to scripture, to lineage, nor to the authority of some person, I'd love to hear it.
You are correct in assuming that whoever takes the Qur-aan as the central scripture is a Muslim. That’s really all that is to it. I will just add a bit of a historical background. You can read the Prophet’s history to best judge what Islam he brought.
I will start from the basics:
The fundamental word of Islam, the one word which differentiates between who is a Muslim and who is not is the well known Kalima (كلمة) of Islam, La ilaha illallaah. Which translates to there is none worthy of worship except Allaah. This statement encapsulates the entire monotheistic creed of Islam in it. It is the pivot of any Muslim’s religion. A Muslim strives to preserve this statement in his heart while believing in it. He does this by trying to ensure harmony in his speech and his deeds.
One who lacks firm belief in his heart in this word, is a weaker believer than one who has firm belief, even though both might utter the word in the same manner.
Though we can’t see what the heart contains and hence we can’t normally judge a person’s level of faith, his outward actions, to an extent, do communicate his level of belief. So much about this word.
The one who brought this word to the people was a man called Muhammad (upon him be peace) over 14 centuries ago. The people who he first invited to his religion were the people of of his birthplace, the city of Makkah. His people were originally on the religion of Abraham, worshipping the One God of all that exists, Allaah. But in due course of time, they forgot the truth and started worshiping idols.
So Muhammad (upon him be peace) was sent to them as Messenger by Allaah, just as Messengers from among men were sent by Allaah to earlier people, in order to warn them about the consequences of idol worship and to call them to the worship of the true God, Allaah. Some Messengers which were sent before him were Noah, Lot, Moses, Jonah, Jesus, all mentioned in the Bible and Qur-aan.
Muhammad (upon him be peace), warned the people of eternal hell if they did not believe in his Message and desist from idol worship. And he promised Paradise for whoever believed in him and acted upon what he commanded.
His Prophetic Mission lasted 23 years, of which the first 13 were spent in Makkah and the last 10 were in Madinah. He was made a Messenger at the age of 40, and he dies at the age of 63.
Throughout his mission, Allaah sent the Verses of His Book, Al -Qur-aan to guide him and his followers, gradually teaching them the rituals of prayer, charity, pilgrimage. As the Messenger (upon him be peace) and his followers were the subject of great deal of ridicule and torture, Allaah, in these Verses, also supported them and encouraged them. Allaah also taught His Messenger how to present his Message to people in the elegant way.
>The so called mystic Islam also known as Sufism, is a deviant sect, and is fundamentally a gateway to polytheism, as it borrows many practices from polytheistic religions.
This illustrates that you have a fundamentalist streak in you: you've described a form of Islam you don't like as being "deviant". You're gatekeeping Islam.
I kept reading your comments above till reach here. Your knowledge about Autism is pretty narrow and region-centric. No one considers taking drugs and shaking as Sufiism. It's opposite of that. Sufism is all about self discovery and connecting to God with Dikr. The Dikr as described as in Quran as satisfaction of heart.
LOL. I loved it when ppl assume others are ignorant. Why and how did you assume I haven't? I have read multiple, in Urdu And english. You didn't read what I said. Your knowledge of Suffism is narrow and wrong. No point arguing with you unless you get to know what Taswwuf is.
Very much on point. If the core of your business, or application, depends on external code, you are taking a huge risk integrating it into your code base.
Sometimes it is better to invent a wheel that does exactly what you need, and nothing more. Software is sometimes about NOT reusing code.
The re-inventing the wheel thing always starts with good intentions and works fine until you have to throw in hundreds of hours to maintain a beast that nobody likes but everybody has to use. You end up being locked in your own solution and instead of blaming your supplier you can blame yourself.
This is not true in most cases. Most situations rely entirely on integrating 3rd party code, and the risk to the business is zero. Most tools and services dont last long enough to justify reinventing the wheel.
Absolutely. Sometimes it feels like some projects want nothing more than stick their tentacles into your business layer. I don't have a lot of OCD but that sort of thing definitely triggers it.
Example: object-database mappers making you put database-specific things into your domain entities, or innocently implementing the unit of work pattern. It's right there, all you have to do is let us in!
I had no problem accepting just 10% of my book sales - without going through a traditional publisher, it would have been impossible for me to get my book carried by physical book stores. Of course, this was 10 years ago, when physical book stores were more common; this may not be such a consideration today.
You get an advance. And in the past it used to be possible to get a royalty stream too. In the 80s and 90s, some authors made fortunes like this.
Today, you'll only get an advance - or maybe small royalties on low-volume sales and no advance.
If you self-pub, you have to consider the market very carefully. If you look at the Leanpub best-sellers they're mostly senior-level niche performance/career dev topics in mainstream corporate languages - like specific performance tweaks in Java.
The bigpubs usually do broad-brush topics like "How to Visual Studio". They're aimed more at beginners and side-movers. They have the marketing links to sell into the big physical bookstores, but for tech that market is smaller than you might expect, so they're unlikely to make anyone rich.
But... it's worth considering all of this is just another example of product/market fit. You get the best results from growing a customer base and giving them what they really want, just as you do for any other business, but with some added complications around product creation and distribution.
You might want to write a fun book about something creative and unusual in tech, but even with a following it's unlikely to sell many copies.
With selfpub you have some control over the big picture. Bigpubs just do what they do. Upfront money and your name on real shelves in a real bookstore may seem sweet, but there are huge costs to authors down the line, and mostly they're not a good deal now.
I've just signed a contract to write a book and I get an advance and then 10% (goes up to 12/15% if more are sold).
One major reason is that I am more likely to finish it and get it done than if I rely on it myself.
Another reason is that I want to be known for one niche, this will help and if that works out then I could likely self-publish and keep more of the profit.
It is slightly more nuanced than I want as much cash as possible for this thing.
Publisher deadlines are both a blessing and a curse. I did the last book I wrote through a publisher. It was a concept I'd had bouncing around in my head for a while but hadn't made much progress on beyond a rough mental headline. When a publisher wanted to run with it, it forced me to focus on it--fortunately during a period when doing so wasn't too onerous.
On the other hand, I've had other periods when it would have been difficult.
The other thing with publishers is that you're now tied into publishing industry economics. So you can't typically write, say, 100 page book even if that's what you think is the best match for you and the subject. (This is probably the thing that would be most likely to keep me from using a publisher the next time.)
An advance is, just what it sounds, an advance payment on royalties. Publishing, unlike film/tv or music generally doesn't play games with royalties, so, if the book sells, once you've earned enough royalties to cover the advance you will get additional earnings.
I've gone the traditional publishing route with three books so far.
Making money wasn't the goal.
A traditional publisher organized a technical review, editorial review, cover design, type setting and project management for me; the result was better than I could have done on my own.
Sure, I could have hired an editor and a cover designer and all that, but would have been exhausting and a financial risk.
So, I went with a publisher, and accepted that I'd likely never recover the advance that the publisher payed.
If you're after exposure or the best result, a traditional publisher can still be the way to go.
The main flipside is that you also have to play by the publisher's rules, so length, deadlines, and (importantly) price. You probably can't set a lower price or give away digital copies like you can if you self-publish which may work against a desire to use the book for exposure/reputation/etc.
At least my publisher (Apress) is pretty open to giving away free copies for review (everything that helps bring reviews on Amazon is a plus), and limited discount vouchers etc.
But yes, you don't have all the freedom that you have with leanpub & co.
I have a book through Apress as well. Among other things, their contract was pretty generous about my repurposing small chunks of book material for other purposes--which I've taken full advantage of. They also offered some sort of discount so that an organization could have me do a book signing though I don't know the financial details. (And said organization might have done this if it weren't through a known publisher.)
On the other hand, the price is set quite a bit higher than I would have set it personally for maximum exposure. And I don't have the right to broadly distribute free electronic copies to just anyone I want.
Historically, publishers take on the cost of marketing and printing. Printing copies of a book demonstrates their capital investment in the work and that helps unlock distributors, retailers. Often publishers would supply editing and formatting/publication services too.
Now, for ebooks, the marginal cost of "printing" is close to zero. But editing and marketing are still expensive. I think there's a lot of momentum towards preserving the historical royalties even if the business has changed.
The music industry seems to have made this leap to electronic distribution (near exclusively in their case). If royalties have been upset in that industry then we should probably expect something similar for writers.
It's worth noting that the 10% vs 80/95% figures are comparing different totals. For a traditional publisher, the 10% is against the price of the book (depending on the contract this might be against cover price or against the price the publisher actually receives from the wholesaler). It's not, like the self-publishing platforms, the percentage of net profit after costs like printing etc.
Probably less than you think. When there was a lot of discussion around ebook pricing back in the day, it turned out that ebooks weren't really all much cheaper to produce than physical mass market books. The costs associated with the physical books were only around $2 per copy.
There are a lot of things publishers do behind the scenes that no one thinks about. Sure there are things like marketing and printing. There are a lot of other little things too. Content editing. Publishers often hire another person who is at least or more knowledgeable on the subject to review what the author says. They make sure that all the code works, does it make sense in certain contexts etc. When code doesn't work, its the reviewer's fault.
There are other things too like a content editor. Does the entire book flow together (2+ authors, that's a big deal). Is the language style the same? Are there spelling and punctuation errors? Is the formatting correct? Someone has to build the index at the back of the book. (Sometimes the author does this). Lots of things. Not to mention, the company puts their name behind the book. I buy a lot of books simply based on the publisher and pass on others. As an author, you're paying them to lend their reputation to your work.
> There are a lot of things publishers do behind the scenes that no one thinks about.
That is definitely part of the publisher's pitch, but from what I gather, that is less than they'd like you to believe.
> Content editing.
Good editing is invaluable, but it's important to distinguish different kinds of editing. "Developmental editing" is high-level "what kind of book does the market want us to write" guidance. If you're writing a technical book, you shouldn't need that. You should already be plugged into the scene for the people who want your book and know what they want. Your domain expertise should also mean audience expertise.
An editor at a publisher doesn't have your domain expertise, and probably doesn't know the audience as well as you do. When I wrote a book on software architecture for games several years ago, an editor at O'Reilly wanted me to use Objective-C as the language (instead of basically pseudo-codish C++). Think about how much I would have regretted that choice today.
Line editing and copyediting are making sure your stuff is grammatically correct and consistent. This is really helpful, but you can also simply hire a freelancer to do it.
> Publishers often hire another person who is at least or more knowledgeable on the subject to review what the author says.
They pay technical editors a pittance. (I know, I've been asked to be a technical editor for several books.) Those that have the deep skill you want are too busy and worth too much to do it. Those that say yes probably won't do as good a job as you'd hope. It's simply not worth their time to go through your book with a fine-toothed comb. They'll find a lot of stuff, but you really can't rely on them. And, again, this is something you could hire yourself if you wanted to.
For my two books, I simply made the repo for them open and let people file bugs. That has been much more thorough than a couple of busy technical editors would be.
> There are other things too like a content editor. Does the entire book flow together (2+ authors, that's a big deal). Is the language style the same? Are there spelling and punctuation errors? Is the formatting correct?
Yeah, this is important. Though it's worth thinking about how much you're willing to pay them to do this. If it's worth it to you, great. But it may not be.
> Someone has to build the index at the back of the book. (Sometimes the author does this).
Yeah, indexing is a chore. You'll do a better job than an indexer would because you know the domain better. You can also, honestly, just kind of half-ass it. Indexes are less important now that you can search in ebooks.
> Not to mention, the company puts their name behind the book. I buy a lot of books simply based on the publisher and pass on others. As an author, you're paying them to lend their reputation to your work.
This is true and is a big one. The big publishers have done a great job of building prestigious brands and they loan you that prestige. That can be very valuable. This matters in particular for fiction where there is a sea of garbage. With technical books, it's so hard for an author to finish a book that I think it's less of an issue. Also, frankly, I think a lot of publishers have been diluting their brands by publishing stuff that isn't that good.
Either way, readers will come to your book largely because of the topic and hopefully because they know who you are already. A pretty woodcut animal and O'Reilly logo on the cover only goes so far. How much is that worth to you?
The way to look at this is: will a traditional publisher increase my sales enough to more than pay for the share they take? If so, do it. If not, they're just leeching off you.
As someone who came down on the other side of this decision, I agree with these points. It's something that I've lightly regretted, but I wouldn't have started the process without Manning. Also being published with Manning has given me career opportunities that I wouldn't have dreamed of without them.
Ultimately, I've decided to go with the traditional route because I don't have the audience.
That's what I'm receiving from Manning for Rust in Action. I didn't sign the book contract with a traditional publisher for the money, I signed up for the credibility.
Also, that 10% is after discounts and payment processing fees. So it works out at about $2/book.
I bought your book very recently! I was reading the online version and it kept losing my place, so I bought the ebook version for the epub. It was recommended on Twitter when I asked for Rust resources.
I don't think it's unreasonable that for many people, a publisher with experience and an existing distribution network & agreements, perceived authority as a "real" publisher, and a marketing budget and plan will result in 10x the sales. I've had a friend self publish in another industry and getting books shipped around the world and in stores is a hassle as a lone operator - and that's if people even know you exist.
If you live in the US (she didn't) then Amazon can be a decent option for a lot of reach though.
Amazon and other similar print on demand services also help with this but it's not suitable for all products (full colour can be a problem).
With certain professional books publishing with a known publisher definitely gives the book a certain "gravitas" (deserved or not) that it may not have if you independently publish. And if you're mostly writing a book to burnish your professional reputation (as is often the case) rather than to make money, that may be a pretty good tradeoff even if you could have made more in direct sales if you published yourself.
To be honest, I'm not sure publishers do an awful lot for you directly though you will probably have to pay out of your pocket for things like editing services if you go it yourself, but the name does still often matter.
By far the biggest thing we've missed with the book I mentioned was the distribution and marketing reach. It was a niche craft industry so it was possible to get interest from individual stores and retailers, but since demand came piece by piece it was only really possible to ship one or two boxes of books at a time (at an average cost of around ~$10 per book via courier, depending on country) rather than leveraging cheap container shipping along with a bunch of different titles into a warehouse or as part of a big push campaign, like a publisher could.
I did a lot of the editing myself, my writing is fine, but my feedback was mostly typos/grammar/phrasing - not a coherent look at the overall structure and content which a more experienced editor may do.
Everyone should obviously do things as they individually see fit. But, in my experience, publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general. All I know is that I find it hard to even publish a blog post without typos if someone else doesn't edit it--and sometimes even then.
(The good news is that it's not really expensive to pay someone to do if you don't really need the services of a full-blown editor who is advising on structure, flow, etc.)
> publishing something without someone else doing at least copyediting/proofreading tends to lead to a lot of errors and is certainly not something I would advise in general.
Agreed, but it's easy to hire a freelance copy editor. In fact, that's often what traditional publishers do too.
Yep. The one time I really wanted one, I just paid an intern working for a magazine editor friend of mine a few hundred dollars and that was fine.
IMO, it's not something you can rely on software for although software catches a lot of course. The one time I didn't do it worked out OK. But I had a co-author and we had sufficiently reworked the (somewhat shorter) book enough times over a fairly long period that I decided it had had enough fresh eyes on it to stand on its own.
And of course publishers aren't perfect either. I've found a few typos in my last book which did go through a traditional publisher even though I also proofread it pretty carefully. (One mistake was in front matter which I added fairly late on which makes me suspect there would have been a lot more errors in the book if I didn't check it carefully myself.)
Content is easy to get for publishers, and they have to often invest significant time and money to get the book to market. They often take a risk on printing X copies, and they don't sell, the publisher eats the cost. You can say to just print on demand, but that is costlier per book. They often have to provide editors to clean up the book, do marketing through their channels, and promote the book.
Most authors don't do all this guy did. Most simply write the text and leave it there. Publishers do everything else this guy did to move the book.
(I've written parts of several books, and have received small royalty checks for well over a decade)
We both seem to have direct experience of working with a publisher, but I think you are overstating the effort of most publishers these days. Too many books, even from reputable publishers, are of fairly low quality, which as a reader bothers me even more than stuff like this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/markos/49564386913/in/datepost...
Also, I don't see why them taking on a risk of printing upfront should be offloaded on the author through smaller fee.
When either party takes on more risk in a deal they want compensation. This is perfectly understandable.
If an author wants access to the distribution network of a certain publisher, they must pay.
Ever wonder why the biggest authors don’t simply run their own publishing houses? They understand the value provided. And they rarely if ever reach 50% in royalties (I’ve never heard it, in many decades of following professional writing).
What I do find is authors generally have no idea of the value provided. In which case they’re welcome to self publish. But self-publishing rarely results in great sales either.
Both avenues have pros and cons. That said, I’d likely still choose a publisher, since my time is also important, and I’d prefer not having to be average in a dozen skills when I can invest effort at being much better at a few.
Fantastic read. My only concern is that there wasn't any talk around cost of false positives (selecting a test to run where it is unnecessary) vs false negatives (incorrectly dismissing a relevant test), as those costs in terms of their effect is not symmetrical.
The cost of a bug slipping through because a test being skipped will be higher than running an irrelevant test to a commit.
Yes a regression slipping through would far outweigh the benefits of reduced tests. The thing the post didn't make very clear is that thanks to our integration branch, the chance of a missed regression is still nearly zero. If the scheduling algorithm misses something, the failure will show up on a "backstop" push. These are pushes where we run everything, and then a human code sheriff will inspect any failures, and if something was missed figure out what caused it and back it out.
So the costs of missed regressions are:
1) More strain on the sheriffs (too much strain means the need to hire more)
2) More backouts which is annoying to developers and can mess up annotation (though we have ideas to fix the latter).
For the record, the algorithm with the 70% reduction in tests has a regression rate almost on par with the baseline (it's ~3-4% lower). This hasn't seemed to result in much additional strain on the pipeline.
There isn't any discussion of the cost at all. It just says the test run rate is down by 70%, it doesn't say anything about the defect detection rate, even though they say this is their cost function.
10 core-years per day sounds like a lot but it's only about a 10kW load, and they've saved 70% of that, or about $20 of opex per day.
One of the authors here, I can't exactly deny that line was added to sound impressive, so guilty as charged. However the savings are much higher than $20/day for a few reasons:
* Many tasks run on expensive instances (hardware acceleration, Windows)
* We have OSX/Android pools that run on physical devices in a data centre (these are an order of magnitude more expensive than Linux)
* There are ancillary costs. For example each task generates artifacts which incur storage costs. These artifacts are downloaded which incur transfer costs.
* There are also overhead costs (idle time, rebooting, etc) that aren't counted in the 10 years / day stat.
All these things see a corresponding decrease in costs with fewer tasks.
Is that really all? That would be 3650 cores running full time. 3W per core sounds too little for power consumption. And do power costs really dominate the price of running CPUs? I'm guessing the savings here are at least one order of magnitude more than your $20/day.
I get about $1000/day based on some EC2 prices for typical machines I've used, though I'm sure Mozilla's requirements are different and they can negotiate better prices than I can.
> “ The cost of a bug slipping through because a test being skipped will be higher than running an irrelevant test to a commit.”
It really depends on the type of bug, and perhaps this could be factored into the model by also correlating change sets with outage severity or complexity of a fix.
"A bug slipping through" in this case just means slipping through to where it's detected on a later push to the integration branch, or failing that, when a more complete set of tests runs when the change is merged into the main branch. In no case will poor scheduling here result in a bug making it into the final product. It's just that it's more costly in human time to detect it later, so currently the entire goal is set at detecting the problem on the first round of testing after a push.
they have a try server that developers can push to to run a swath of tests before bringing into the integration branch. outsiders can access that by being vouched for by a developer in mozilla and insiders obviously have access to it already. having used it as an outsider it's kind of a pain to use with a lot of setup and options. so having something like `mach try auto` would be awesome for outside devs in addition to the reduce server costs.
Well said, I could not have said it better. Just to add, the productivity boost you get from short build times, in a long run, think of a project you work on for years, will out perform ANY gain you get from using a library, templates, and the like that kills your build time.
I think you are confused about the intention. If you want order independent initialization you could just as well use the old initializer list. The idea here is that you DON'T want to accidentally initialize x with y.
I don't think I am confused. The point is that, logically, either you do not tag something with names, and then, naturally, the order decides. Or, you tag something with names, and then, given you named things, there ought to be no order.
Not so with the C++ initializers. An initializer list in a constructor should mirror the declaration order, or you won't go warning free. Every time you'd touch the internals of your class, you'd need to touch every constructor that uses an initializer list.
Same with the struct initializers now. You are having this:
struct A { int a, b, c};
you need to do this:
A a = { .a = 1, .c = 3};
but you can't do this:
A a = { .c = 3, .a = 1};
because... well, because C++. There is no reason to disallow the second form except for .. what exactly? What is the reasoning of the C++ committee to not be able to mirror what one can do in C (where, aside of the missing typedef or "struct" in front of A, both forms are valid)?
Just as you're saying, the C++ committee seems to be confused about order-dependent and named initializations, and for some love-of-bean-counting insist that named initialization needs to respect order _as well_.
There is of course a reason which is well documented in the papers. Constructors, and initialization expressions can have side effects in C++. An invariant of the language is that member constructors are always invoked in declaration order, so if you were to swap the initializers around, the compiler would still have to initialize them in the original order, which would be surprising.
Which does not means that it couldn't be done, in fact constructor initializer lists have the same issue and you are allowed to list them in any order but this is considered a language mistake and most compilers warn about out of order initializer. This mirror the arbitrary evaluation order of function parameters which is also considered a mistake.
In the end there was no consensus to allowing an arbitrary order, but in the future that can be relaxed without breaking any code if a consensus is reached, while the reverse could not be done.
As usual it is always compromises.
Anyway, at last for me, initializers are more about writing more explicit code and be more robust in the face of changes.
> There is of course a reason which is well documented in the papers. Constructors, and initialization expressions can have side effects in C++. An invariant of the language is that member constructors are always invoked in declaration order, so if you were to swap the initializers around, the compiler would still have to initialize them in the original order, which would be surprising.
The following:
Point2D pt = {.y = 5, .x = 6};
should not have meant that 'y' is initialized before 'x'. It's only a lexical convenience that exists before parsing. When the code is parsed into an AST, the actual AST would reflect the following code:
Point2D pt = {.x = 6, .y = 5};
There is absolutely no reason to enforce declaration order.
I tend to agree with ephaeton that forcing the order is a little heavy-handed. But thanks for the insight about initialization order.
For what it's worth, I find strictness pedantry like this fairly useless in production. For example, a JSON file has an order to the elements of an associative array, but Javascript doesn't. So most of the time, I treat associative arrays as having no order, and use another array to map indices to keys or whatever.
Contrast that with PHP, which does maintain key index in the order it's added. There have been countless times where it turned out that I needed that order, and it saved me the work of declaring the extra array. Even more importantly, I've never been hit by that surprise (of not having order) in PHP, whereas I have in pretty much every other language.
So maybe PHP is less pure, but truthfully, pureness is the single biggest source of friction in my daily life. Basically the entirety of my day now goes to setting up environments from minimalist environments, working around subtle language errata, or translating what I want to do in my head to the domain-specific language decisions that are so widespread in languages like Ruby.
I prefer the lazy route now in most things. Just give me everything, with the least-friction needed to do what's in my head, and let me prune it/optimize it when I'm done. So in this case, I'd prefer C++ to have a strict ordering of elements, but let me initialize them in any order, so that I can think in abstractions rather than implementation details. Which is why PHP is roughly 100 times more productive for me than C++, even though I grew up with C++ and know it like the back of my hand.
Reading the title I had the complete opposite expectations. Thinking that he is talking about a system where you want to have meeting with random people to talk about business.
Working from home this entire year, I have tried to practice taking at least 15 minutes everyday, couple of times a day, laying down and just listening to my thoughts, understanding my anxieties. Trying to understand why I feel the way I do, instead of running away from them by distracting myself by various means.
This new habit of mine truly has been a life saver in this year.