Okay, fair enough, you got me: I wrote his name on a piece of paper and was standing on it when I wrote that comment in order to absorb his authority. You win this Internet argument.

I was definitely not standing on the authority of Elliott, merely making use of his words and crediting him for it, so you are simply wrong.

On the contrary, quoting is exactly the act of borrowing another’s idea, but doing the courtesy of giving credit to the person from whom you borrowed it.

Good writers borrow, great writers steal. -T.S. Elliot

I’m confused… was that wall of text supposed to have sold me on something?

You want to turn my 300 lines of clear, readable and concise logic into 1,000 lines of English paragraphs that break up the functions of my code into yet smaller pieces of code devoid of context?

If a function has 300 lines without a lot of supporting documentation then I doubt that it is “clear, readable and concise” anyway.

Now I have to dig through that book, ignoring all the shit I’ve read hundreds of times because it doesn’t compile into anything, just to debug an off-by-1 error in a loop buried in a paragraph explaining the original developers diatribe on why we’re looping over that range?

I have never found it hard at all to skip past comments that are not relevant because my code editor helpfully colors them differently from the rest of the code, making it easy. Does your editor not do the same?

(Also, by now you should be especially good at skipping past it, given that you have apparently “read [it] hundreds of times” instead of skipping past it, for some reason.)

This is the sort of academic crap that sounds good but in practice is just terrible for anything other than small projects that are intended specifically to teach.

It depends on what you are doing. If you are implementing relatively simple logic like a REST API handler, then it is probably overkill. If you are implementing a relatively advanced algorithm, then having a running narrative of what is going can be extremely helpful.

It’s not immediately obvious to me where the examples are.

Maybe this is finally a good use for depleted uranium?

Ugh, I really hate it when people make comics like this that make it seem like solving our problems would be so simple. In the real world, where things are a lot messier, you need the blade to be at least several times higher for it to work properly!

Wrong approach:

Im sorry that your annoyed by my simple mistake, but thats you’re problem.

I love that Eratosthenes was able to estimate the circumference of the earth with the amount of math we had in his era.

Not only that, but he was much closer to the right answer than Columbus was, yet Columbus is the one to get a day named after him, even though Columbus would have died due to starvation as most people had predicted he would if he had not gotten lucky and run into a continent that no one knew about except for the people that lived there and the Vikings and the Chinese and other people that didn’t count! It just proves the principle that the key to success is not to be smart but to be lucky.

Think of it as being a different way of saying “anxiety scrolling”, because “doom scrolling” is primarily referring to the experience of being driven by anxiety to compulsively consume a never-ending stream of bad news.

For example, I had to cut myself off from following what is going on in Los Angeles earlier today because I recognized the signs of going past the point of merely keeping tabs on it to stay informed and compulsively anxiously reloading the page to see if there were any new updates.

Example intellectual comments being posted here:

I didn’t realize neckbeard atheists oppressed so many people compared to religion, thanks to the author for opening my eyes

So many militant atheists. Saying so much, all just to prove the comic right.

Having said that, my specific objection is not to all of the discussion taking place here, but to the fact that a lot of the comments seem to be projecting their own personal viewpoints onto the comic.

Also, I was not shouting people down; I was speaking in all caps to be funny. It’s fine if you personally did not think I funny, but that was the intent (which in retrospect could probably have been conveyed more clearly if I had also dropped the comma so that it was purely a stream of words), just like it was the intent of the comic author to make a dumb joke rather than to state a strong opinion about atheists. I think that it is useful to separate the intent of what an author was trying to accomplish from your own thoughts on the subject.

Sure, but that also means that I get to make my own contribution to the discussion. 😀

DEAR LORD PEOPLE, SOMETIMES THERE IS NOT A DEEPER MESSAGE AND IT’S JUST A DUMB JOKE!

Seriously, check out the other comics by this artist. They just like absurdist humor, like this one:

Thank you for linking to a source!

Sure, I am obviously not obligated to read the book, but what I was specifically responding to was the following remark:

Yeah isolating yourself from everyone you disagree with is awesome, truly nothing bad ever comes out of it.

which in turn was a response to the following:

Do you have to agree with everyone you give your money to? What sort of economy would that be?

Probably a pretty nice one, actually.

Ergo we should feel obligated to give money to people who we believe are actively harming the world?

Huh? What did he do?

You are absolutely in the wrong so unfortunately I had to actually make you die on that hill, but I am upvoting anyway to leave a memorial in honor to your bravery for standing up for your principles.