you know what? MMOs actually just suck as a social experience

older WoW expansions are fun as a singleplayer game (despite Blizzard’s best efforts), and OSRS is fun as a singleplayer game too (despite Jagex’s best efforts)

but like “hey do you want to hang out in WoW with me? you just have to grind for 10,000 hours and the whole time you’ll be learning how to pilot what might as well be a space shuttle. but after that we can actually play the game! or, actually after the 10,000 hours there’s no game left to play - it’s just infinite grinding. but we can finally grind together! also it’s $15/month”

“uhh no actually how about we play a normal multiplayer game instead”

I feel like learning the import system is the worst part of learning any language because literally all of them suck for different reasons:

in Python you can’t import from parent directories without jumping through hoops and adding unnecessary __init__.py files everywhere. also the syntax for importing is really unintuitive and documented across multiple PEPs, each of which is a heavy read on its own

C-family languages generally don’t have proper import systems at all and what they have instead is probably a headachey clusterfuck

Java.

in Clojure if you want to import a file from another file at all you have to use a command called lein to generate a massive overcomplicated structure of directories and config files and then edit the config files and even then you have to import them using a fully-qualified namespace and every single file must manually specify which namespace it’s part of, but the namespace must also perfectly match its directory structure or it will silently fail to be imported. it’s like this confusing halfway point between a proper module system and a com.java.www.java.src.code.style.clusterfuck.system

I don’t know what’s going on with Common Lisp’s import system but it scares me, just like everything else about that language

Racket doesn’t have a proper concept of namespaces. if you import rackunit then by default everything from that module will be dumped into your current file, but you can choose to prefix those names with something like rackunit:so that they become named things like rackunit:check-eq? and rackunit:check-false. this isn’t a separate namespace though - it’s literally just renaming every import to start with rackunit:

one of JavaScript’s many, many import systems actually seems pretty nice - but I couldn’t tell you which one it is because I was relieved just to convince package.json to let me import anything at all and left it at that. good luck finding any documentation on your chosen import system btw, or even information on how the import systems differ or which to use. oh also if you install Node packages then have fun figuring out how to import them too. here’s a hint: it involves bashing your head against package.json some more

TypeScript somehow makes the package.json thing worse. like so much worse

IIRC Lua’s import system is based on the current directory instead of the directory of the current file, which means that you have to be cded to exactly the right directory when you run Lua code or you’ll get import errors and not know why. also the only clear description of how the import system works is in Programming In Lua which is outdated and missing some important details. and this isn’t even getting into the clusterfuck of trying to use someone else’s Lua library - especially if luarocks is involved

every time I learn a new language I dread when I’ll have to figure out how to import something, because there’s always some bullshit like this. every time

“video games allow us to live fantasies that would otherwise be impossible”

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I feel like there’s a certain type of personality that is drawn to Linux because they like solving software problems and Linux gives them lots of software problems to solve

but eventually they get too good at solving Linux problems and get bored, so they switch to Arch - which delivers new software problems to their computer all the time. but eventually they get too good at solving Arch problems so they switch to NixOS, which is an infinite wellspring of software problems to solve

https://normal.style/@soft/116307511061326977