Which is exactly why powershell is great - you never have to parse things. Anytime I have to drop into sed/awk in Linux, it always feels like I'm fighting the system.

Since property is the first parameter to sort-object, you can just do:

ls | sort Length/code

It helps that by default it won't run any script files. Once you enable that, it still won't run any remote code unless you enable that. And even then you can restrict it to only run signed code.

Yes, you can. Except instead of getting back text, which you then have to parse if you want to do anything with, you get back a stream of .NET objects which will be formatted into a text table if you do nothing with them, but also let you do things like this:

ls | where { $_.Length -gt 5000 }

See Watson vs. United States for an example of the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law. This likely would have ended up completely differently in Canada.

I don't know if it was officially accepted, but I believe they added ' as a digit-group separator: 0b0010'1101'0011'0111'0101'1100

The explanation I've heard for useless showy features (a la peacock) is that the ability to put resources into giant shiny feathers show that you have the ability to gather enough food to live, and have leftover energy to devote to impressing the ladies. It's not so much the particulars of what the feature is, but rather having resources (or money) to burn indicates that you're successful enough to be a good mate.

Resource handling. Lower-level languages require you to manually release any resource you acquire. Every piece of heap allocated memory needs to be freed. Every file you open needs to be manually closed. Every network connection, mutex, or handle needs to be released. It's feasible to do, since you don't have to worry about exceptions. But it does require an incredible fastidiousness to make sure that you always clean up after yourself.

When you get to the higher level languages, you get garbage collection which means never having to manually release memory again. But everything else is stuck being released manually. You can't do it reliably in regular code, since exceptions get in the way, so they introduce things like finally or using. But again, you're relying on the people using the class to remember to clean up every single time they use it.

In C++ you can rely on stack-unwinding to clean up after you. I haven't checked in a "delete" in over 10 years of C++ coding. Every C resource we use gets a wrapper class that automatically releases it when the object is destroyed. It's really the biggest thing I miss when working in other languages.

Professor Norton Nimnul has already beaten you to it.

Out of genuine curiosity, can you point me to evidence showing the universe is non-deterministic? I'm not sure how one would go about making that kind of observation.

Fair enough, and judging by some of the other responses, you were justified in your interpretation. I guess I overestimate /.'s rationalism. To be clear, I don't attribute Parmenides with any great insight into the quantum nature of the universe, anymore than I think that Democritus had any clue about what we've come to call "atoms". That being said, the line of reasoning on "what is" vs. "what is not" does have some interesting things to think about if time is indeed an emergent phenomenon.

He obviously wasn't "right" in the sense of having anything useful to say about the world in any scientific sense - I would have thought that goes without saying. I just found the parallel amusing. You're reading a bit too much into an off-hand comment.

This sounds a lot like what he was saying 2500 years ago.

From Wikipedia:

I've interviewed for a company that required you to write out a stack implementation in C++ from scratch during the interview. It's a great problem, since it's quite easy to define, nearly everyone knows what is required, but it's complicated enough that when coding by hand on paper, every entry-level programmer is going to make a mistake, and you can see how they think when you tell them there's a mistake. Even when they get it right, you get a lot of insight into their problem-solving style by listening to them defend the design.

The paper is real, but its value as currency is only due to a collective agreement to value it as such.