>One thing that annoys me about software culture in general is how, by virtue of being a programmer, people are also political scientists, economists, biologists, chemists, astronomers, manufacturing experts, doctors, nutritionists, sociologists, anthropologists, and the grand poobah of dismissing speech because of the way it's phrased.
>You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments.
Wouldn't that require real AI though? I thought for a minute that NLP (Natural Language Processing, not the other meaning(s) of the acronym) might help, but then thought that it may not work for cases where the comment is quoting another comment. Note: I'm not at all an expert in any of those fields, just interested.
How about giving an acknowledgement on your page when someone submits a project / news? Did it a couple of times lately and saw nothing after the submit, even to show that the submission was received.
I really liked the Go Tour, which I checked out 3 weeks ago. Then I was a bit disappointed to see that the UI changed some, making it less user-friendly. (Everything used to fit on one page, except for longer examples, for instance.) Still like it overall, though.
Okay. Please consider setting up a page to collect email addresses of non-U.S. developers for if/when you expand to international later. WorkMarket does that, IIRC.
Thanks. I suggest SWIFT - http://www.swift.com - as another option - if you also plan to offer this to people (developers and/or consumers (of developer's work) outside the US. It's been around for ever, and is reliable and used by zillions of businesses worldwide. I've used it myself with no issues.
That's an interesting theory. I suspect it is likely to be applicable in many, if not most cases.
Related anecdote: a person contacted me a year ago and asked if I'd be interested in being a co-founder of his startup that would be using $(major_social_networking_service)'s API (as it's main source of information, for doing something that piggybacked on that service's user profiles). After thinking about for a while, I said I didn't want to get into that, and also cautioned him about the risks of relying on another company's API as the basis of the startup, as they could change the rules at any time and that might break his business model.
Interestingly, we've seen events (in the tech news) since then that showed the risks of that approach.
Your theory seems like a more generalized version of my thoughts, and I like it.
Heck, I commented in a hurry without thinking :( I did know about stack traces (used so many times), and you're right, of course. Thanks for pointing it out, though :). Now that I think of it more, since stack traces exist, there isn't even a need for that top-level try/except, for early prototypes. You can just write your main code, run it and let it fail, and fix the errors as you find them, by using try/except/finally etc.
Though it works, one potential issue I found with it is that it does not give enough context as to where in the program the exception occurred. E.g. if I have more than one open() call (all for read mode) in the code, it will give the same error message for an exception occurring on any of those open() calls (as long as the exceptions all happen for the same underlying reason, such as "file not found". E.g.:
Exception occurred:
IOError(2, 'No such file or directory')
Had you come across this and found any way to handle it? I though of passing some unique code for each case, but there seems to be no way to do it, because we are not calling the except clause ourselves - Python does it.
Edit: just thought of a (crude) way to handle that issue: declare a global variable, say, "location", and set it to a different numeric or string value at each place in the code where an exception may be thrown, or at least at one place, say the top of the function, in each function or method. And then in the single except clause, print the value:
print "location=", location
This will at least help narrow down the area of code in which the exception was thrown.