Probably need to post your country/region. Many of the better online stores are regional.

For Germany, grundstoff.net has a good selection. They seem to ship all over Europe, but the webpage is only German…

Man pages are displayed in less (which acts as the so-called “pager” here), so you can search man pages interactively like you search in less. And you do that by pressing /, then typing your search term and pressing Enter. Then you can jump between results with n and Shift+n. This is also how search works in vim, by the way.

Perhaps another tip in this regard, to search in your command history with Bash (for re-running a command you’ve previously used), you can press Ctrl+R, then start typing your search term. Pressing Enter will run the displayed command. To skip to older search results, press Ctrl+R again. If you want to edit a command before running it, press → or Ctrl+F instead of Enter.
This UI is a bit fiddly in Bash, but worth figuring out.

As for Fish, it’s great for new users, because:

• it has a much more intuitive Ctrl+R UI, displaying all the search results interactively and not behaving weirdly in certain situations.
• it automatically sifts through your command history as you type and suggests the most recent command which starts with the prefix you typed. You can fill in its suggestion with → or Ctrl+F, or only use the next word from it via Alt+F. You can skip to older matches with ↑, which is then a proper search like Ctrl+R in Bash, so not just prefix-matching. And yeah, overall just really useful, because it’ll both make it quicker to run frequently-used commands, and sometimes suggest a complex command which I didn’t even remember that I once ran.
• its tab-completion shows short descriptions of what most (sub-)commands or arguments do.

But:

• don’t set it as your system-wide default shell or there’s some chance of shell scripts not executing correctly. What you should do instead, is to set it as the startup command to run in your terminal emulator.
• the syntax of Fish is somewhat different to that of Bash, which can be confusing when you’re still learning the Bash syntax. It’s not the worst thing in the world, as it basically only affects scripting and more complex command chains.
  Scripting is not a problem, because you can throw a shebang into the first line to use Bash syntax (#!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash). You should add a shebang to your scripts anyways.
  And running more complex commands isn’t too big of a deal either, because you can run bash in your terminal to launch Bash, then paste the command into there to run it, and then quit back to Fish with exit or Ctrl+D. Typically you’ll know to run bash, because Fish’s syntax highlighting turns red after you’ve pasted a complex command.

For those who don’t get it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationery

Oh yeah, I’m in favor of using type hints. People here are also saying that Pyright is more useful, which I haven’t used yet.

I was involved as the unlucky bastard supposed to sprinkle software engineering on top of a Python project 2+ years ago, and I just remember how much I understood right then and there why Python devs thought static typing was cumbersome. Felt like I had to write Java again, except it also didn’t work half the time.

Interesting. If it’s only in the type checker, can IDEs/editors correctly show the type information of inferred types then? Do they call the type checker themselves to retrieve that info?

Yeah, I only used Mypy so far. I thought it was inherent to the language spec, not the type checker.

I guess, some of your colleagues might have also just used Mypy so far, though…

In the case of Rust, you can also omit the type annotation in the vast majority of cases and the compiler will infer it.

Man, how do you even get up there like that?

It feels more solid to have a complex program covered by tests, yes, but how can this be confirmed in an objective way? And if it can, for which kind of software is this valid? Are the same methodologies adequate for web programming as for industrial embedded devices or a text editor?

Worth noting here that tests should primarily serve as a (self-checking) specification, i.e. documentation for what the code is supposed to do.
The more competent your type checking is and the better the abstractions are, the less you need to rely on tests to find bugs in the initial version of the code. You might be able to write code, fix the compiler errors and then just have working code (assuming your assumptions match reality). You don’t strictly need tests for that.

But you do need tests to document what the intended behaviour is and conversely which behaviours are merely accidental, so that you can still change the code after your initial working version.
In particular, tests also check the intended behaviour of all the code parts you might not have realized you’ve changed, so that you don’t need to understand the entire codebase every time you want to make a small change.

To be fair, Python doesn’t have type inference, so the type hints are quite obnoxious, and the type checkers for Python are also not as reliable as in languages with native static typing (even if that is often caused by libraries not providing type hints).

I find ants and bees and such interesting in this regard. They work together more seamlessly than humans do and arguably have a higher form of sociality.

Especially in Western cultures, we humans like to think of the individual and compare ourselves to the individual of other species. But that is a logical fallacy.
Are you smarter than an ant? Sure. But are you smarter than a human-sized ant hive? That’s a far trickier question to answer…

Interesting and valid point, but Kotlin’s when is not actually pattern-matching. It really is just syntactic sugar for if-else, like you’ve demonstrated.
Actual pattern-matching allows matching on the structure of a data type. So, you formulate a pattern to describe the structure and then you can choose different code paths based on whether the pattern matches or you can also access fields inside of this data type.

Rust allows pattern-matching even in variable assignments, which is going to look funky, but I think it shows quite well that pattern-matching isn’t just a fancy switch statement: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2024&gist=3a8d126fa0cb9736597793915b00dd5d

So what happens is that:

• there’s a check whether the data type has the described structure, and
• where the pattern contains wildcards (like variable ‘slots’), the corresponding field values from the data type get put into those wildcards.

When someone writes this in Rust:

let x = 1;

It’s still pattern matching under the hood, but the pattern x is just a singular wildcard, so the right-hand side just gets ‘assigned’ to that variable name.

And with these simple examples, you might think that being able to access field values this way is silly, since you can also access them via my_data_type.foo, but it becomes more useful with deeply nested data types, and in particular in statically typed languages, it allows you to work with different data types without type casting. So, it would be more useful of a feature for TypeScript than it might be for JavaScript.

A video game I play recently added on-screen panic buttons, so for all the items you might want to use in a pinch. It’s a turn-based game, so you really have all the time in the world to check your items, but they’re still all listed there to remind you of the options you have. And of course, I still manage to completely ignore them when I get into a panic. 🫠

I could imagine that they didn’t want to do something called “Destiny 3”, because people would expect that to be better than Destiny 2, which is virtually impossible, if you’re gonna start over from scratch, with how many years of development have gone into Destiny 2 by now…

Oh damn, I suspected as much, but I interpreted the arm in the third panel to be part of the jaw. So I thought, maybe with the big ears it might be a Dingo, but that seemed awfully specific for what should be the fairly obvious setup for a joke…

Blade is my favorite color.

I’ve never used Facebook, but I’ve seen people say that Friendica is quite similar to Facebook (in case you care about that).

This song in some Cyrillic language: https://open.audio/library/tracks/102128

I think, that’s not a coral, but rather a dead tree next to a stream…

Yeah, the wording is confusing. A long time ago, there was no paid software, there was only software where you got the source code and other software where e.g. it was pre-installed on some hardware and the manufacturer didn’t want to give the source code.

In that time, a whole movement started fighting for software freedom, so they called their software “free”.