January 05, 2018
On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 10:00:18AM -0500, Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> I don't know what caused it. I'm not at high risk, I never get the flu. I only got the shot because I had a baby and my wife cajoled me into it (didn't get one for baby #2, and didn't get sick). But my internal bias says "it's because I got the stupid shot". Note that I got sick pretty much right after the shot.

It is likely just symptoms caused by your body's reaction to the shot, not the actual virus. In all likelihood, these symptoms are much milder than what you'd get from the real virus.


T

-- 
If the comments and the code disagree, it's likely that *both* are wrong. -- Christopher
January 05, 2018
Most people who say they have flu, do not have flu, they just have a cold.

The flu jab does cause some people to have the appearance of a cold immediately afterwards. For most there is no affect.

I have asthma, I get the flu jab. I still get colds, some occasionally require anti-biotics because the cold has allowed a bacterial infection to get into my lungs. Flu would be much worse. I don't want flu. Having the flu jab is a zero loss situation.

-- 
Russel.
==========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk


January 05, 2018
On Friday, 5 January 2018 at 04:20:06 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 1/4/2018 7:41 PM, Mike Franklin wrote:
>> If you have simple, mundane work that needs to be done, make a list and send it my way; you should have my e-mail address.  But please be specific; "fix error messages" is just going to get a reply from me asking questions.
>
> Ok, fix error messages, like you've seen me doing already. To find which files need work,
>
>     grep "error(" *.d
>
> does the trick, turning up:
>
> ctfeexpr.d
> dimport.d
> dinterpret.d
> dscope.d
> e2ir.d
> expression.d
> expressionsem.d
> func.d
> glue.d
> iasm.d
> mtype.d
> nogc.d
> nspace.d
> opover.d
> optimize.d
> s2ir.d
>
> as needing ` `. There's a lot of work just there :-( It's best to resist the urge to do more than just add in ` ` where they are obviously appropriate. Don't make perfection the enemy of better. I've found it best to have only one PR for this at a time, otherwise it's a lot of extra work rebasing.
>
> A longer term goal is to find ways to refactor the code to make maximum use of pure, const, scope, and nothrow.
>
> I appreciate any and all help with this.

We should put things like this somewhere where it can easily be seen by others.
The obvious candidates are the Wiki and Bugzilla, but both have historically proven to yield poor results, e.g.

https://wiki.dlang.org/Get_involved#Contribute_to_the_DMD_and_DRuntime

So let's try something new:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/projects/2


Note that GitHub supports two labels for issues: "help wanted" and "good first issue" and provides many interfaces that let interested people discover such issues.
For details:

https://help.github.com/articles/finding-open-source-projects-on-github/
https://github.com/nodejs/admin/issues/20
https://github.com/showcases/great-for-new-contributors (<- Rust appears here)
...

Of course this only works for GitHub issues.
January 05, 2018
On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 07:28:10PM -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 1/4/2018 2:34 AM, Mike Franklin wrote:
> > Walter seems to pop in daily, and occasionally reviews PRs, and his PRs of late are mostly just refactorings rather than fixing difficult bugs.
> There's a lot of technical debt I've been trying to fix with that, and nobody else seems willing to do it. For example, fixing the error messages so they make use of color syntax highlighting. It's boring, tedious, unfun work, meaning I get to do it :-)
[...]

I'm sad that it has to fall upon Walter to do these routine, mundane, tedious work, when we greatly need his expertise elsewhere in D land. Walter, what about posting a list of boring, tedious stuff that has landed on your plate somewhere, so that those of us looking for something to do can pick it up?


T

-- 
Stop staring at me like that! It's offens... no, you'll hurt your eyes!
January 05, 2018
On 1/5/18 10:11 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 10:00:18AM -0500, Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> [...]
>> I don't know what caused it. I'm not at high risk, I never get the
>> flu. I only got the shot because I had a baby and my wife cajoled me
>> into it (didn't get one for baby #2, and didn't get sick). But my
>> internal bias says "it's because I got the stupid shot". Note that I
>> got sick pretty much right after the shot.
> 
> It is likely just symptoms caused by your body's reaction to the shot,
> not the actual virus. In all likelihood, these symptoms are much milder
> than what you'd get from the real virus.

Haha, again, never been sicker :) I think it took me a month to get over it. But it doesn't mean that my experience justifies people who are at higher risk not getting the shot. I'm just not sure the insane push for EVERYONE to get the shot is really worth it.

-Steve
January 05, 2018
On 1/5/2018 6:26 AM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> For my projects, even if a PR isn't perfect, unless it is just plain bad or goes in a direction I strongly disagree with, I'll merge it anyway pretty quickly and just fix up the bits I don't like later myself.
> 
> So if something is OK but not great.... don't close it, merge it! Just fix it up after and leave a note for the original PR author showing your fixup commit so they can learn from it next time.

The compiler is far too complex for that. It increases the technical debt.

I have pulled many PRs like that, and they've just resulted in regressions and even more work for me to do.
January 05, 2018
On 1/5/2018 7:39 AM, Seb wrote:
> We should put things like this somewhere where it can easily be seen by others.
> The obvious candidates are the Wiki and Bugzilla, but both have historically proven to yield poor results, e.g.

Sigh. Bugzilla is the answer, and lots of people do troll Bugzilla looking for things to do. Adding another list somewhere else is not going to improve things.

What's needed (from my perspective) is more people doing quality work. Not more process.

Mike Franklin is a standout here. He's actually going through the files I listed and has already posted several PRs doing the modifications. That is what we need.

--------------

Now, in my work highlighting error messages, I noticed that a number of them could be made better by relying less on compiler jargon and having a bit more exposition on what the problem is.

For example, there were several uses of the word 'ctor' instead of 'constructor'. There are also uses of 'aggregate' instead of 'struct, union or class'.

These kind of improvements cannot be done en masse, because someone has to look at each specific message, the context which will generate it, and think about how better to express this to the user. A good message will present the context, what is wrong, and perhaps suggest corrective action.

Some messages are generic for a diverse collection of actual errors, and should be broken out into different messages for each error.

This has been done already for many messages, such as the ones where I added spell checking so the message could suggest what might have been meant instead, but there are an awful lot of messages in the compiler which are workmanlike, but are a bit abrupt.
January 05, 2018
On 1/4/2018 10:20 PM, Patrick Schluter wrote:
> The only people I ever saw with a flu (I mean a real influenza) had all one thing in common: they all had gotten the flu shot.

There was a 3 month gap between the shot and getting the flu, so there's no credible connection. I haven't gotten the flu in other years when I got the shot, even when unshot others were felled all around me :-)

I'm certainly going to continue getting the annual shot. I just rolled the dice this year and lost.
January 05, 2018
On 1/5/2018 7:00 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> In any case, I still will not get one and probably won't until I'm in a nursing home and they make me :)

You can get the flu and not show symptoms, and infect the people you're around. The elderly can die from the fule. The shot is free and a pinprick, I see no upside to avoiding it.

January 05, 2018
On 1/5/2018 7:41 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> I'm sad that it has to fall upon Walter to do these routine, mundane,
> tedious work, when we greatly need his expertise elsewhere in D land.
> Walter, what about posting a list of boring, tedious stuff that has
> landed on your plate somewhere, so that those of us looking for
> something to do can pick it up?

I posted some in reply to Mike in this thread. Mike has taken up the cudgel and is submitting a flurry of PRs! :-)

Here's more:

1. try to reduce dependency of code on global variables

2. add missing/inadequate/incomplete Ddoc comments to functions

3. each source file now has a direct link at the top to the coverage report for it. Devise additions to the test suite to improve coverage