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Recent Comments
Ben Nadel replied to a post I'm Beginning To Think That Much Of Programming Is Wildly Subjective
Comment posted December 6, 2022
@Scott, If I'm working in someone else' code, I do try to keep it consistent with theirs (no matter how much it might hurt my sensibilities). But, if I am being honest, I haven't worked on an application that anyone else is actively maintaining in quite some time (years). Even so, when I have to upd... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Adam Cameron replied to a post I'm Beginning To Think That Much Of Programming Is Wildly Subjective
Comment posted December 6, 2022
Excellent overall sentiment, Ben. I feel "seen" in the tag islands section. I will not comment further on that (despite feeling like it). One danger with "it's subjective" is ppl too often use it as a reason to stay on that hill they want to die on, rather than it being a solution to it. No matter w... read entire comment from Adam Cameron.
SCOTT BENNETT replied to a post I'm Beginning To Think That Much Of Programming Is Wildly Subjective
Comment posted December 6, 2022
I couldn't agree more! The "right way" now is very rarely going to be the "right way" in 5 or 10 years. I have never believed in the idea that there is only "one best way" to do things. (This mindset is a big reason why I have always resisted implementing community frameworks). I believe you need to... read entire comment from SCOTT BENNETT.
Ben Nadel replied to a post I'm Beginning To Think That Much Of Programming Is Wildly Subjective
Comment posted December 5, 2022
@Sanjay, Totally agree on the art vs. science. The two concepts must weave together to create a solution. It's like the Matrix when Morpheus talks about how some rules are meant to be bent, other broken. The trick if figuring which are which based on experience.... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Sanjay replied to a post I'm Beginning To Think That Much Of Programming Is Wildly Subjective
Comment posted December 5, 2022
Completely echo your thoughts... it is "art" - so by definition is it going to be subjective. Oh and don't forget MVC vs no-MVC! Like in Math and Science, the experimental outcomes or calculations must be repeatable and consistent. Likewise the code has to perform consistently and should be repeatab... read entire comment from Sanjay.
Ben Nadel replied to a post I'm Beginning To Think That Much Of Programming Is Wildly Subjective
Comment posted December 5, 2022
I was trying to come up with a good analogy for the "it's just syntax" sentiment, and I think Food is a good one. Or, at least, recipes for a particular dish. One person could take a set of ingredients and make a world class, MICHELIN Star version of a dish. Then I - someones who doesn't know anythi... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Using Picture And Source Tags To Prevent Loading Hero Image On Mobile Devices
Comment posted December 3, 2022
Shout out to William Rae for pointing out that my code actually broke the rotation of the hero image. My JavaScript to rotate the hero image was updating the <img> tag's src attribute. But, once I added the <source> tag, the image tag was no longer in control. I had to update the rotation logic to c... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Using LATERAL Joins To Get "Top N" Records From Each Group In MySQL 8.0.14
Comment posted December 2, 2022
@Ian, You touched a nerve with me 🤣 I think it was on the Shop Talk podcast, or maybe it was CodePen Radio - on one of them, they were talking about converting code from Ruby on Rails over to Golang. It was some migration code that they were changing. Anyway, months ago, when this first came up, th... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ian Turton replied to a post Using LATERAL Joins To Get "Top N" Records From Each Group In MySQL 8.0.14
Comment posted December 2, 2022
As regards any 'speed' issues... The alternative to doing it in one query (and the way most devs would approach it) would one db call to get the members and a 10x loop to get the 5 top messages. That's 11 times the number of (admittedly simpler) query parsing/optimisations and 11 lots of network lat... read entire comment from Ian Turton.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Working Code Podcast - Episode 103: Birdsite Go Boom
Comment posted December 2, 2022
Testing a cookie change. This is only a test. Word up.... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Using LATERAL Joins To Get "Top N" Records From Each Group In MySQL 8.0.14
Comment posted December 1, 2022
@Chris, SQL got some pretty nifty stuff in it! I really love the idea of the LATERAL join; though, I haven't really used it in a production setting yet. Most of the stuff on this blog is pretty straightforward (under the hood).... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Chris G replied to a post Using LATERAL Joins To Get "Top N" Records From Each Group In MySQL 8.0.14
Comment posted December 1, 2022
This is so cool 😎... read entire comment from Chris G.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Nesting JSON Functions Inside JSON_ARRAYAGG() And JSON_OBJECTAGG() In MySQL 5.7.38
Comment posted December 1, 2022
This nested use of JSON_ARRAYAGG() and JSON_OBJECT() can be used in concert with LATERAL joins in MySQL 8 to run some pretty interesting queries. In this post, I'm using it to gather the "Top N" rows per each row in a group: https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4362-using-lateral-joins-to-get-top-n-records... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Hassam Ali replied to a post You Can Render Anything In Angular
Comment posted November 23, 2022
Thanks for the kind words Ben! I too miss the old react with life cycle hooks, i know there are better ways to write the sample which I did but it should be the job of the framework to make right approach easy and bad approach hard.... read entire comment from Hassam Ali.
Ben Nadel replied to a post You Can Render Anything In Angular
Comment posted November 23, 2022
@Hassam, ❤️ Very cool ❤️ I really appreciate you putting that together. It took me a minute or two, looking at the code, to see what was going on. The Hooks approach to building React application really requires me to turn my brain a bit inside out. I see that you have three different hooks to get t... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Hassam Ali replied to a post You Can Render Anything In Angular
Comment posted November 23, 2022
I tried to replicate it with react hooks, here is what I come up with: https://codesandbox.io/s/native-elem-rovfgx?file=/src/MessengerComp.tsx... read entire comment from Hassam Ali.
Ben Nadel replied to a post "Enterprise" Is Not A Dirty Word
Comment posted November 23, 2022
@HB, Thanks, I'll take a look at the article you shared.... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
H B replied to a post "Enterprise" Is Not A Dirty Word
Comment posted November 23, 2022
There is REAL tension between wanting to be cool - not having much in the way of (visible) boilerplate, dependencies, etc. - and wanting to scale to the real world, with its costs. In olden times, you had Steve Yegge on the value of simple languages (Javascript, Python), and Joel Spolsky on the valu... read entire comment from H B.
Ben Nadel replied to a post You Can Render Anything In Angular
Comment posted November 21, 2022
@Hassam, I've only played with earlier versions of React that had life-cycle methods (like componentWillMount() and stuff). In that case, it feels like a relatively similar approach. When it comes to "new" React with Hooks, I don't know how it would work. I feel like you'd have to create a special E... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Hassam Ali replied to a post You Can Render Anything In Angular
Comment posted November 21, 2022
interesting read. i have worked with angular and react, and react also provides a similar escape hatch. my guess is all of frameworks allow an escape hatch like this.... read entire comment from Hassam Ali.
Zachiah Sawyer replied to a post You Can throw() Anything In JavaScript - And Other async/await Considerations
Comment posted November 18, 2022
@David, Interestingly enough typescript types caught errors as unknown and only lets you type them as any or unknown manually so I think that it is a best practice to assume that errors could be of any type not just Error... read entire comment from Zachiah Sawyer.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Using A Closure To Encapsulate CFThread Execution And Error Handling In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 17, 2022
@Dan, I think we actually had this very same conversation back in 2015 🤣 I'm not sure how much of that is still an issue. And, if you're spawning your threads inside a ColdFusion component, then I think most of the values referenced will either be in the local scope of the calling function or in th... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Dan G. Switzer, II replied to a post Using A Closure To Encapsulate CFThread Execution And Error Handling In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 17, 2022
@Ben, Things may have changed in ACF, so I might be wrong, but I think you have some potential issues that would make this not thread safe. I know that in ACF, the closure is used to hold references to the current request, so if any of the variables your closure is relying on die after the request, ... read entire comment from Dan G. Switzer, II.
Edward Beckett replied to a post Code Kata: Water Breathing Exercise In JavaScript
Comment posted November 16, 2022
@Alex, Show us something better code guru and we might respect you —- Ben's code is procedural in nature because he's old school - but he's 100% professional and consistent as they come. He's a highly respected developer because he CAN implement pretty much anything he wants — can you? I'm from Miss... read entire comment from Edward Beckett.
Ian Turton replied to a post A Database Column For "Date Updated" Has No Semantic Meaning, Nor Should It
Comment posted November 15, 2022
@Ben, "I like to avoid nullable columns wherever possible". Me too, absolutely. Hate the bloody things. For var/chars I never use them, because I've never come across (others will have I suppose) the need to know whether an empty string is 'really empty' or 'don't know yet'. But they're hard to avoi... read entire comment from Ian Turton.
Ben Nadel replied to a post A Database Column For "Date Updated" Has No Semantic Meaning, Nor Should It
Comment posted November 15, 2022
@Ian, While I love the idea of not doing a "hard delete", I do still want to move the "deleted" row out of the table. What I have found is that with "soft deletes", it's harder to make indexes that can enforce uniqueness. What I would love to do is create "archive table", that receive a copy of the ... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ian Turton replied to a post A Database Column For "Date Updated" Has No Semantic Meaning, Nor Should It
Comment posted November 15, 2022
@Ben, Ironically (is it, I don't know!) the component I mentioned doesn't bother with deletes because I don't do them. Can't think of the last time I did an 'app based' hard delete on a table (certainly not one anyone would care about me auditing)... read entire comment from Ian Turton.
Ian Turton replied to a post A Database Column For "Date Updated" Has No Semantic Meaning, Nor Should It
Comment posted November 15, 2022
@SCOTT, I also do both, and like you only audit a few 'major' tables in any given system. I built a component that can take an insert/update SQL statement, run it, check for triggers and create a table-specific audit record with just the changed columns. I do find 'lastUpdated' occassionally useful ... read entire comment from Ian Turton.
Ben Nadel replied to a post A Database Column For "Date Updated" Has No Semantic Meaning, Nor Should It
Comment posted November 15, 2022
@Scott, I've dabbled a bit with an "audit log" in an application many years ago; but, I haven't tried it since. That said, I have added many piece-meal log tables to track some "delete actions", mostly - to your point - so the Support team can point to something and say, "Actually, Mr. Pink, on your... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
SCOTT BENNETT replied to a post A Database Column For "Date Updated" Has No Semantic Meaning, Nor Should It
Comment posted November 15, 2022
I used to always add dtUpdated columns in all my tables too, but did not usually show that to users. However, in recent years, I don't add that column automatically to tables anymore, because I noticed that just having an update date was not very helpful to me. Now if a table is going to hold record... read entire comment from SCOTT BENNETT.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Only Solve One New Problem At A Time
Comment posted November 14, 2022
@Mark, Changing infrastructure is a fascinating topic unto itself. It's one of those things where you think the "abstractions" mean that you can do things quietly, behind the scenes, and your application developers don't have to know about it. But, changing infrastructure inevitably has unseen conse... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Mark S. replied to a post Only Solve One New Problem At A Time
Comment posted November 14, 2022
A well written article. I would even say that this can apply to other type of technical works outside of coding. Working with as a consultant in infrastructure, i had a lot of those moments where the costumer or the employer had to know that it would be a mess if we solve multiple problems at the ti... read entire comment from Mark S..
Ben Nadel replied to a post Only Solve One New Problem At A Time
Comment posted November 13, 2022
@Ben, Yeah, exactly. We really just didn't have the expertise to build the new system in the way we built it. We were solving lots of problems at the same time.... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Winters replied to a post Only Solve One New Problem At A Time
Comment posted November 12, 2022
@Ben, Thanks for sharing those examples. I'm not sure if this was the case in that v6 to v7 rewrite, but I can definitely see that rewriting with a new language and/or set of tools, without key members having experience with those things, can quickly multiply estimates as devs explore and negotiate ... read entire comment from Ben Winters.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Generating Fallback Avatars Using CFImage And ColdFusion
Comment posted November 12, 2022
One thing I forgot to include in the post is some code to list out all the fonts that the JVM knows about: <cfscript> fontFamilies = graphicsEnvironment = createObject( "java", "java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment" ) .getLocalGraphicsEnvironment() .getAvailableFontFamilyNames() ; writeDump( fontFa... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Application Setting "useJavaAsRegexEngine" Tells CFML To Use Java's RegEx Engine For Built-In Re-Functions In Adobe ColdFusion 2018
Comment posted November 12, 2022
@Peter, The POSIX character class that I've definitely used in the past is [:punct:] for punctuation. That one really represents a lot of individual characters. Most of the other abbreviations seem like they are actually longer than the characters they represent 😆... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Peter Boughton replied to a post Application Setting "useJavaAsRegexEngine" Tells CFML To Use Java's RegEx Engine For Built-In Re-Functions In Adobe ColdFusion 2018
Comment posted November 12, 2022
Should have checked before posting - on my last point I made an incorrect assumption - there is no conversion performed for the replacement string. (At least in Lucee; I'm not installing CF to test.) So if one toggles useJavaAsRegexEngine they must know to go update existing replacement strings, esc... read entire comment from Peter Boughton.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Only Solve One New Problem At A Time
Comment posted November 12, 2022
@Ben, First off, great name 😉 second, I agree. There are always exceptions to the rule. Even within the span of my own company - InVision - we did a complete rewrite of the front-end (v1 -> v2) going from separate jQuery-based pages to an AngularJS single page application (SPA). And, it was quite s... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Winters replied to a post Only Solve One New Problem At A Time
Comment posted November 12, 2022
I'm familiar from experience of the stakeholder need for incremental changes. However, I do wonder if sometimes the existing codebase may be too far gone and incremental changes are far more costly than a rewrite by someone who knows what they're doing (obviously I'm speaking of a personal experienc... read entire comment from Ben Winters.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Proxying Gravatar Images For Better Avatar Caching In ColdFusion
Comment posted November 11, 2022
Now that I'm proxying the Gravatar images, I've been noodling on create per-user custom fallback avatars for people who don't have a Gravatar image: https://www.bennadel.com/blog/4354-generating-fallback-avatars-using-cfimage-and-coldfusion.htm This uses ColdFusion's image functionality to generate ... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Only Solve One New Problem At A Time
Comment posted November 11, 2022
I haven't read through the comments yet, but here's the Hacker News link if anyone is curious -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33523032... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Application Setting "useJavaAsRegexEngine" Tells CFML To Use Java's RegEx Engine For Built-In Re-Functions In Adobe ColdFusion 2018
Comment posted November 11, 2022
@James, I haven't tried this, but I'm wondering if it would show up in the payload from a getApplicationMetadata() call? That said, there are a number of things I would love to have on a per-Component basis. Not least of which is something like localmode="modern" in Lucee CFML. Also, being able to t... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Application Setting "useJavaAsRegexEngine" Tells CFML To Use Java's RegEx Engine For Built-In Re-Functions In Adobe ColdFusion 2018
Comment posted November 11, 2022
@Peter, I'll have to plead ignorance on the POSIX vs Apache ORO engine stuff. I honestly don't really even know what POSIX is exactly. But, I'm pretty sure the ColdFusion docs - maybe years ago - talked about the RegEx patterns as being POSIX... or maybe it was simply POSIX compatible - I don't real... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Peter Boughton replied to a post Application Setting "useJavaAsRegexEngine" Tells CFML To Use Java's RegEx Engine For Built-In Re-Functions In Adobe ColdFusion 2018
Comment posted November 11, 2022
Just seen the following article but couldn't comment there without registering: https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2022/11/switching-cf-to-use-java-regex-engine/ Followed this link and was further disappointed to see Ben calling it a POSIX Engine. :/ ColdFusion by default uses the Apache ORO regex engine,... read entire comment from Peter Boughton.
James Moberg replied to a post Application Setting "useJavaAsRegexEngine" Tells CFML To Use Java's RegEx Engine For Built-In Re-Functions In Adobe ColdFusion 2018
Comment posted November 11, 2022
There doesn't appear to be any way to determine if this flag is enabled or not. If third-party modules are written that depend upon newer syntax, I would hope that developers wouldn't blindly enable this feature server or application-wide as it could potentially cause problems with preexisting regex... read entire comment from James Moberg.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Only Solve One New Problem At A Time
Comment posted November 10, 2022
@Mike, Thanks! Someone just showed me on Twitter - so random what gets traction. But, I'm happy someone found some value in this.... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Mike replied to a post Only Solve One New Problem At A Time
Comment posted November 10, 2022
Congrats on making Hacker news! Was browsing through it and saw your domain😀.... read entire comment from Mike.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Using Abstract Classes As Dependency-Injection Tokens With "providedIn" Semantics In Angular 9.1.9
Comment posted November 10, 2022
@Ken, No worries :)... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.
Ken replied to a post Using Abstract Classes As Dependency-Injection Tokens With "providedIn" Semantics In Angular 9.1.9
Comment posted November 10, 2022
okay I get it sorry didnt read entire post thanks for all this... read entire comment from Ken.
Ben Nadel replied to a post Only Solve One New Problem At A Time
Comment posted November 10, 2022
@Tyler, If I can give you a warning, my company is in the 5th-year of a ground-up rewrite! 😱 I beg of you, do things incrementally!! But, in all seriousness, good luck to your team, I hope things go smoothly.... read entire comment from Ben Nadel.