• @[email protected]English
        8•2 months ago

        Now that I think about it, I wonder how large the ratio between ‘(’ and ‘)’ across the entire internet is, due to emoticons.

        Most people write them left to right. Now, do people use the smiling one ‘:)’ more or the sad one ‘:(’? My gut feeling would be a larger quantity of positive emotions, however, people tend to use ‘:D’ instead.

        How about individual chats? This could actually be an indicator about the relationship between people, at least in an era before emojis.

        • @[email protected]English
          12•2 months ago

          :) definitely wins out. Whenever I’m watching a streamer make a prediction that’s amusingly close to the truth, the chat turns into a sea of coy :) comments.

          Also, I feel like the crowd that would use :D have now moved onto emojis.

    • EchEnglish
      43•2 months ago

      Each spaced group is 10

      Each , is 100

      Each ; is 1000

      In short, yes.

  • @[email protected]English
    27•2 months ago

    The person who decided that the case ... of statement in Bash should use unpaired right parentheses has found a soulmate and/or a mortal nemesis in abandoned-quiche.

  • nickwitha_k (he/him)English
    11•2 months ago

    Those two commentors genuinely brought relief to the unexpected anxiety that abandoned-quiche caused.

  • @[email protected]English
    36•2 months ago

    Years ago I remember reading Visual Studio c++ patch notes that mentioned having fixed a bug with having more than 255-deep nested parentheses. Good times

    • @[email protected]English
      7•2 months ago

      The max at my job is 20 and it’s already horrifying. (C# though) (The variable naming also sucks, a bool ‘ok’ is constantly overwritten and 12/20 indents are 'if (ok) { ') (guess who’s leaving that job, large part because of the coding practices)

    • @[email protected]English
      4•2 months ago

      The really beautiful thing about Lisp is that every syntactic construct in the language is the same type of object.

      The thing that makes it so ugly to look at is that every syntactic construct in the language is the same type of object.

  • @[email protected]English
    16•2 months ago

    When I was a child, English had the convention of alternating parentheses with brackets (so a nested thought [like this (or this)] would be slightly easier to place within shifting contexts).

    Seems like a good solution, but I’ve found excessive nesting of thoughts has a side effect of making a writer sound distracted or just a bit more difficult to follow.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•2 months ago

      I did that when doing pen and paper maths (or in the occasional latex), but now that my maths are exclusive programming is full nested parenthesis all the way.

    • skulblakaEnglish
      12•2 months ago

      I used this as a strategy for nested parenthesis when I was writing in school but my teachers always told me to just break things into more sentences. Which was honestly probably the correct move. At this point my favorite method for dealing with this has become footnotes, we need more footnotes in novels and casual reading. The only time I’ve ever seen that done is in The Bartimaeus Sequence by Jonathan Stroud, in which he greatly overuses them, and I absolutely loved it.