Clojurians Log v2

Hi guys, Just a simple survey: for test or demonstration, we use fooor bar in english. Not sure to understand where it comes from? In french, it is toto a firstname used in some jokes, it could be a nickname but I actually don't know anybody having that name. So what about foo and bar in english, and what about other languages?

@caumond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar -- most likely from military slang...

You'll also see quux https://www.techopedia.com/definition/27997/quux

I had no idea they were one word "foobar". I thought it were two words we sometimes combine.

foo, bar, baz, quux -- I don't know if there are others that are common. I tend to use wibble quite a bit which I think comes from comic books of my youth.

Ah, yes, wibble seems to come from Viz Comic https://www.definitions.net/definition/wibble ?

when I read the definition, foo and bar were really two words

Yes, you'll see foo, bar, foobar, sometimes fubar.

funny ! a full story was behind that 3 letters. maybe, we'll have some other countries updates tomorrow morning !

I believe quux came from Guy Steele (he has used the pseudonym "Great Quux")

he uses that to publish poetry / cartoons

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Q/quux.html

Yeah that agrees with the link I posted above. That was kind of a nice thing to learn!

I’ve been slowly learning Nix to manage packages on OS X to replace homebrew. It’s not as up-to-date but it has a lot of potential.

I've seen gazonk. And I use that myself since. Also fubar is rather an acronym for ”fucked up beyond recognition”.

“beyond all recognition” (my OCD had to fit in that a)

Thanks. Totally feel ya! 😃

I fubr.d it.

Just so you know, beginners to programming are really confused when they see “foo” and “bar”. I don’t have a source to cite, just my personal experience.

On the subject of hardware, after having an M1 laptop in the house (for my wife) I’ve ordered one for myself too. I found that I much much prefer to just grab the M1 to do some quick internet searches compared to my phone, since it’s so fast to wake from sleep and unlock. Day and night compared to my 2017 intel MBPro.

I still work on a 2010 mbp.. I should probably upgrade at some point.

And do you have examples ?

I’ve helped friends through intro to programming classes, and they have to digest a lot of new keywords like “def, class, for, if, then, else”. If English isn’t your first language (and perhaps even if it is?) there’s little difference between the official syntax and foo,bar. They read it all as abracadabra!

I would prefer things like a, b, c or x, y, z or even more domain specific stuff like “stock_price”

I always thought it was quax, and pronounced it in my head as "quacks"

Well, I've had better days. I'm experimenting with babashka for the first time and thought a good first project would be to rewrite a bash script I use to back up the two laptops and one desktop in the house. It was pretty straightforward to translate the bash into Clojure, but I thought I'd be clever and replace a shell-out to rm -rf some/dir/* with Clojure. Well, a spare dot was left, a symlink was followed, and you know the rest... There goes the desktop. 😞 Fortunately, the script worked a few times, before I messed with it, and I have a very recent (minutes old) backup, but I'll need to reinstall Ubuntu...

Oh no...

Oh boy.. That's terrible, amazing backup though

Yeah, very lucky. Don't get me wrong, @borkdude, I'm still very impressed with Babashka. I was just aiming that gun poorly.

> a spare dot was left as in, your some/dir/ was actually some/. somehow?

yeah.

Classic Unix mistake.

yeah, recursion over . is classic for sure

we've all been there

❤️

which widely used PL released a version that tried to delete your entire HD on uninstall? I want to say it was Scala

Just for my understanding: the mistake was that /some/. got deleted instead of some/foo/?

How does this require a re-install of Ubuntu? Unless /some was /home... I guess?

or /usr or /etc

if all you lost is home you don't need any reinstall

(though you do need to create a new account from recover mode)

right

I think what I did (I would be able to tell for sure, but...) was /some/. using a too-clever-for-me recursion (.isDirectory, .listFiles, etc.). I will need to order another USB pen big enough, but I'll boot into it tomorrow and try to find out for sure. Annoyingly, I had already changed my mind (see https://github.com/eamonnsullivan/backup-scripts/commit/e0123d5f96c21b06239895de842e1dfe33ffb92c) about my cleverness, but that wasn't on the machine at the time. I think I failed to connect to the MacBook Pro, and then somehow carried on. The other amazing bit of (bad) luck is that it's the first of the month, and the script tries to start a completely new backup, which is where that rm -rf comes in. Oy.

Maybe next time babashka.fs will be released... and you can use https://babashka.org/fs/babashka.fs.html#var-delete-tree to delete a file tree

Any reason you're not using rsync for this? :)

I am using rsync, but my bash script does some clever stuff where it hard-links the backups each day and then starts another fresh one on the first of every month. The core of the backup is just rsync over ssh, though.

Cool. Well, I hope you recover well from this shock :)

rm -rf ./* aka "empty my dir" is often done & risky business, or used to be (distros added some protections in recent times eh?)