What an awful idea......

When I change the dom structure of my website and the according javascript, you'll be required to change your javascript too in order to work with that new structure, when I change the result of a webservice, or call a new webservice or split into two webservice that was previous one, you'll be required to record your customised version of that too.

so basically, no, your fantasy idea is just that, fantasy, nobody in their right mind would do it, it would constantly force you to work for nothing with practically zero payback and if you did this on multiple websites, you'd quite literally be committing yourself to hundreds of hours of unnecessary work just so you can masturbate over the fact that you have the source code.

you like that idea? then you sir are welcome to it, but I as a web site developer will provide you ZERO HOURS of customer support when it breaks and I will redirect every person who asks me about this topic to your inbox and you can deal with them.

I think due to perls nature, it skews people in the direction of writing unreadable code, easier than other languages, so even though it's not perls fault, people learn bad habits, combine them with shortcuts, sidestep techniques, workarounds and ways to reduce the code length and before you know it, you're the only one which can understand the code.

thats my experience from reading other peoples perl code. the language is so flexible, it allows you enough rope to hang you with...

of course, you should avoid writing code which is not obvious, but sometimes this is impossible, so comments are useful.

something I've been doing, is writing code notes about thoughts i've had in relation to the code which generates the thought, so I can write things like // NOTE: this function looks easy, but internally it's doing too much work, I need to break it into chunks

then over time, they can accumulate, get deleted, add more and become a sort of meta-layer allowing people to understand things I've thought in relation to the code written, it's working out quite well so far....would be better if I didnt need to do it, but well, whatever....

I agree with this, you need to write code which is not a impenetrable mess, I don't mind lack of comments, what I mind is lack of structure, that hurts much much more, because sometimes I want to understand the algorithm and the comments are fine, but doesnt help me understand the actual code in the file, line by line.

which sometimes, is important.

he should have added h) readability, I need to read it back to myself in 6 months time and understand it.

the deeper I get into this topic the more I see the universe as an energy field, clumped together in places to form atoms, but they are not separate entities, but merely an observation or easy to facilitate way to see how the field is distributed.

as languages go, you might want to practice english a bit more first :) /troll hahahahah

well that escalated quickly......

but thats socialist, european model just doesnt fit with the american dream!!!

well, I don't remember any stories about the netherlands being on the brink of bankruptcy though, so I suppose it's doing a great job at all that tax collection which the southern countries have so many problems with.

yes, this is rife in spain.

sometimes people are employed autonomo (freelance) and it's apparently a law that if you bill one client 80+% of your total income they have to contract you, to stop the company from cheaping out on the taxes, etc.

then if they fire you, you can get a nice little deal under the table where they agree to pay you X thousand euros because they broke the law and they are gonna get screwed if they get found out, they would need to pay a fine for the tax avoidance, your holiday pay, etc, etc.

although it's not well known, it's useful to know a friend who tells you this so you know when it's your time under the axe, you have a nice ace in the hole to play with, that X thousand euro payment will help a lot when you're looking for a new job sipping mojitos on the beach in barcelona :D

I can imagine in your scenario it'd be a bit more complex cause it's a firmware product and not some desktop or server someplace.

but in general, with run of the mill software...

well it's actually a good point, our ability to detect something would depend on how much energy it expended, therefore crossed the galaxy in a way we could detect it.

small scale example, a computer in the 50's took a whole building, generated a ton of heat and noise, people walking past easily could detect something was there, even if they didnt know what it was, standing inside the main room was hot and the air dry, all easy to detect.

nowadays, computers use a tiny fraction of the power they used to and are thousands of times more capable, you'd have a hard time detecting a cellphone on standby in somebodies shirt pocket even if you were humping their leg, the power signature is practically non-existent apart from specialist technology that even then might not pin down exactly where or what it was.

applying this idea to aliens and their possible futuristic technology, surely it's quite easy to suppose that their power signatures are not strong enough to reach us, or are absorbed/converted to other forms which don't appear identifiable from other normal or natural sources that at the end, they become invisible, yet they could be warping space time in some way and yet using the same power as it costs to turn on a television on our planet.

you get the idea, but I think it's an interesting idea/point of view.

I'm confused, on my debian vps, another debian dedicated server and a further centos server, I could just apt-get the new software.

since it's 100% compatible and most small websites are not even going to touch the potential problem areas, how would this cost a "lot of money" ?

I could upgrade my database in the time it takes to download the packages, hardly a lot of money and even less of time.

yes I agree with you, a simple PHP or LESS system will do away with the problems, in fact, I'm planning to start using LESS and server side compilation/caching soon on our website, however it's a problem that the language doesnt support it _BY_DEFAULT_

sure, I agree it's not the fault of CSS that browsers don't support everything in the spec, but I think we need to start taking responsibility and not delegating so much, you can't say to almost all features that in order to be compliant you only need to support x% of the spec, no, I think we need to start making specifications that work, such as those which say if you don't implement everything in the way that the document explains, you are not compliant.

when reading through w3c specs, sometimes I'm amazing at how much of the spec is optional.....that needs to stop....I understand the reasons in a way, compromises made by people etc, but I think we need to start saying, YES, you NEED to support THAT option and NO you are not allowed to skip it.

then we might start to get more specs which actually work in our advantage.