On 10 July 2014 23:24, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 10:13:14PM +0000, via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 22:03:31 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> >Am I the only one who thinks "Responsive Web" sites, with their characteristic "Replace all meaningful information with wasted space, meaningless photos, and trite slogans in giant text", are an absolutely horrible design that do more to drive people away and trigger their "this looks like an ad, I'll subconsciously ignore it" instinct?
>>
>> I dislike 'em, but survive if it is limited to the frontpage. Meaning: I desperately look for a sensible link in the visual mess of non-information.  I also get the idea that they probably don't really have anything to offer and hired an ad company with an incompetent web designer to do it who arrived at the design by buying a premade page from some other's company's catalogue, then replaced the photos and charged a fortune for it... OR worse: that they are using a PHP-based CMS. Then I start to feel sorry for them and put all my skepticism aside for the benefit of the doubt and hope that I at least find a sensible pdf-file in there somewhere.
>
> I used to love pdfs in blissfully ignorance... until I recently looked up the format. You wouldn't believe this, but did you know that it's actually possible to embed a *video* in a pdf file? Embed another pdf inside a pdf in a hierarchical substructure? Run arbitrary JS code from a pdf? (Which, btw, is *not* the "official" JS, but Adobe's own hackneyed version thereof.) If you were insane enough, I bet you could implement an OS inside a pdf file. Or an FPS.
>

I wonder if you could embed this in a PDF....

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

On 7/10/14, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
> The simplest thing do for each and every member of this community is to have accounts on all social news sites (twitter, facebook, reddit, hackernews) and discuss _there_ things instead of replying to announcements internally.

We like talking here because it's a small but friendly group, and we all know each other to the extent that we can (most of the time) tell when someone is being sarcastic or is just having a bad day.

It's like having dinner with the family vs having dinner with a bunch of strangers.

Also, I'm tired of the constant "what do you think about D vs Rust vs Go" crap that is always asked on Reddit. The D forums kick ass, the people here are great.

On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 04:17:16PM +0200, Andrej Mitrovic via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 7/10/14, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
> > The simplest thing do for each and every member of this community is to have accounts on all social news sites (twitter, facebook, reddit, hackernews) and discuss _there_ things instead of replying to announcements internally.
> 
> We like talking here because it's a small but friendly group, and we all know each other to the extent that we can (most of the time) tell when someone is being sarcastic or is just having a bad day.
> 
> It's like having dinner with the family vs having dinner with a bunch of strangers.
> 
> Also, I'm tired of the constant "what do you think about D vs Rust vs Go" crap that is always asked on Reddit. The D forums kick ass, the people here are great.

I agree. The sense of community in these forum is what draws me to participate; normally I don't like posting things online.

Having said that, though, I do try to post things I find interesting on google+ every now and then. (Though in practice that turns out to be once every few months, which is probably too infrequent to be significant.)


T

-- 
There is no gravity. The earth sucks.

On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 23:15:41 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>
> I'm fairly certain they don't. Heck, I can't even find a 5:4 anymore which at least isn't *as* bad as 16:9. Tolerable, at least.
>
If you're willing to pay a bit more, you can get 16:10 which is...actually not that bad.  I think it strikes a good balance.  Better still, Google has some laptops with 3:2 screens that I'd love to have elsewhere.

> But as for *actual* 4:3, or even 5:4, I really do doubt they're still manufactured.

I think there's still a few 5:4? But for the most part, no.  A big part of the push comes back to marketing BS:  Display sizes are measured by their diagonal, so you can advertise a 20" widescreen for more money, even though it cost less to make than a 19" at 4:3 or 5:4.  And it's "cinematic"! orz

> I think the best bet for 4:3 is to just look for a used CRT. (Heck, at least they can display more than one resolution without looking bad.) I'm kinda jealous of those pro gamedevs with a dual-monitor, one of them being vertical, setup. I should do that. With one of those desks that can adjust to/from standing position. That'd be sweet :)
>
If you want a seriously good CRT, you pretty much want a Trinitron.  For PCs, my personal recommendation is the G-series.  I had a G200 (17" flat tube) for about ten years and it could push 1600x1200 at 85Hz and even do 2560x1600 at 60Hz.  If you're using old consoles, you can't go wrong with a PVM (it works pretty well with a supergun too, though it still can't do some of the wacky modes like what Gun Frontier and Metal Black use).

> (And it'd be *fantastic* for fans of vertical sh'mups!)
>
Can confirm. ;)

-Wyatt

On 7/11/14, 7:17 AM, Andrej Mitrovic via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 7/10/14, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d
> <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>> The simplest thing do for each and every member of this community is to
>> have accounts on all social news sites (twitter, facebook, reddit,
>> hackernews) and discuss _there_ things instead of replying to
>> announcements internally.
>
> We like talking here because it's a small but friendly group, and we
> all know each other to the extent that we can (most of the time) tell
> when someone is being sarcastic or is just having a bad day.
>
> It's like having dinner with the family vs having dinner with a bunch
> of strangers.
>
> Also, I'm tired of the constant "what do you think about D vs Rust vs
> Go" crap that is always asked on Reddit. The D forums kick ass, the
> people here are great.

It all depends on whether one's primary goal is to have a good time or push this language forward. -- Andrei

On Friday, 11 July 2014 at 14:17:27 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 7/10/14, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d
> <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>> The simplest thing do for each and every member of this community is to
>> have accounts on all social news sites (twitter, facebook, reddit,
>> hackernews) and discuss _there_ things instead of replying to
>> announcements internally.
>
> We like talking here because it's a small but friendly group, and we
> all know each other to the extent that we can (most of the time) tell
> when someone is being sarcastic or is just having a bad day.
>
> It's like having dinner with the family vs having dinner with a bunch
> of strangers.
>
> Also, I'm tired of the constant "what do you think about D vs Rust vs
> Go" crap that is always asked on Reddit. The D forums kick ass, the
> people here are great.

I think the "Rust vs Go vs D" stuff isn't crap - it's important. People want to know why they should pick D over the other emerging languages, and what D offers in comparison. I think D would also gain a lot from a website redesign and more information about the tools available for D(e.g, DCD) without having to go digging for them. Just my 2 cents from someone who only dabbles in D.

On 7/11/14, 9:02 AM, Weasel wrote:
> I think the "Rust vs Go vs D" stuff isn't crap - it's important. People
> want to know why they should pick D over the other emerging languages,
> and what D offers in comparison.

Yes. It is a duty of each member of our community to correct (m|d)isinformation if present, and to provide good information about the realities of D. -- Andrei

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 05:52:57PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 7/10/2014 4:01 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
[...]
> >Is it only me that feels like ddoc doesn't scale for designing web sites.
> >
> 
> Not just you, I've been kind of avoiding it. I like that it *exists* as a built-in, and it's certainly better than those XML "comments" that C# uses, but it still has poor readability (and writeability) *within* the source, plus it's really just too "dumb": Purely zero-semantics macro-like text substitution just isn't good enough. Realistically, you just end up needing to post-process its results if you don't want to feel like you've got your hands tied behind your back. In which case, why even bother using it at all?
> 
> I've always wanted something in D that's more like Natural Docs: http://www.naturaldocs.org/documenting.html
> 
> Macroed comments are just an overengineered mess compared to that.

Hmm. In terms of input syntax, I quite like Natural Docs. But it only supports HTML output currently. :-(

While ddoc as a macro system is quite nice, for documentation generation I personally prefer something that understands the semantics of the documentation better. The current way of generating indices and cheat sheets at the top of Phobos module docs, for example, is extremely ugly because it's manual. Ideally, a doc generator system should automate these sorts of things by allowing, say, a generic $(tableofcontents) directive that does the Right Thing(tm). It also should support moving things around (e.g., sort function docs by name, split them up into separate pages, etc.), without requiring external postprocessing tools to achieve.

At the end of the day, the ideal seems to be something akin to Knuth's literate programming: you work on a single source, and the codegen extracts the code parts of it and feeds it to the compiler (possibly reordering pieces of the code), and the docgen extracts the doc parts of it (possibly moving them around) and assembles them into a nicely-formatted document.

Retaining semantic information on the docs is important, since the docgen may need to consult this info to make decisions about where to put things -- currently ddoc is incapable of this and thus can only generate docs in source order. Retaining semantic structure also allows clean multiplexing into different output formats.  While ddoc does allow this to a limited extent, it requires a lot of manual intervention (introduce intermediate layers of macros to serve as abstractions over different output formats) and unnatural ways of writing the input. As a simple example, in LaTeX "Mr. Doe" should be written as "Mr.\ Doe" to get the correct spacing, but in HTML it's "Mr. Doe". You'd have to write "Mr.$(NBSP)Doe" in order to target both HTML and LaTeX, which makes the source quite unreadable.


T

-- 
It always amuses me that Windows has a Safe Mode during bootup. Does that mean that Windows is normally unsafe?

Am Wed, 09 Jul 2014 16:21:46 -0700
schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org>:

> On 7/9/14, 2:59 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > So why not link to select wiki pages from dlang.org?
> 
> Where's the pull request?
> 
> […]
>
> Walter and I are busy enough as is working on D to NOT have new work cut out for us. Please steal any work you can from us.
> 
> 
> Andrei

I'm sure most of the NG folks worry about stepping on
someone's toe by making pull requests for the official
language website without getting an ok from whoever designed
it and from Walter and you.
From my perspective the design between Wiki and front page is
wildly different and causes a friction when navigating the
website. It is possible someone writes a pull request,
someone else who is uninvolved with the web site gives it an ok
and later the original author is frustrated because he
intentionally separated the Wiki from the static part of
dlang.org.
(Not to say there isn't more talk than action etc., but we
 shouldn't pass changes over the respective web site
 lieutenant.)

-- 
Marco

Am Wed, 09 Jul 2014 23:56:20 +0000
schrieb "w0rp" <devw0rp@gmail.com>:

> http://w0rp.com:8010/download
> 
> The download page is the page I've changed the most thus far. I started by taking the different D compilers and so on and breaking them into headings with short paragraphs explaining what each is. I was thinking of putting sections in there for instructions for installing on popular Linux distributions.
>
> […]

I'm getting strange question marks on the right side bar in
Opera 12/Linux:
DMD ? Version 1
DMC ? Digital Mars C and C++ Compiler

The version on the top left is more visibly separated and overall the design feels more light weight with all the spacing. The list of installers is now a bit too slim for my taste. I miss the information about the type of download. For example that the OS X version is a DMG package, or that the "All platforms" version is a ZIP also containing the sources. In a way I liked those old-school HTML tables with images. Personally I could never make friends with the "Windows 8 Metro" design built on two or three colors and flat rectangles. It feels so 80s to me.

Then I wondered if the "Documentation" section should be renamed "Language Specifications" and the links renamed to "DMD 1" and "DMD 2" or if they should be merged into the sections for DMD 1 and DMD 2 respectively, because 7 year old DMD 1 specs are now pretty much obsolete? Someone new to the web site looking for (current) compiler documentation will only get confused.

The red bottom line is great. I also prefer clear end of page markers with a huge margin.

Concerning the instructions for different Linux versions, you may find that they are better maintained on D Wiki or respective Wiki pages of the different distributions. YMMV. Just my 2¢.

-- 
Marco