Believe it or not, “rite” is the, uh, right, word here.

How much slack did you have in your 10.* network? Or was it literally 16.7 million devices?

Then you find out the genie uses a signed data value and you now owe him a wish. You’re not granted magic. You’re compelled to grant the wish. The only restrictions on the genie’s wish is that it must be within your (soft, squishy) mortal power.

I can imagine you being reset to the point of the genie’s wish every time you die (naturally or otherwise) without succeeding. This could well turn into a Groundhog Day type situation.

I would have put IP address access restrictions on that at the very least. I may have even done something like that more than once for various tools in the past.

That way it acts completely open to people (or other servers) in the right places and denies all knowledge to anything else.

Close. Final Fantasy 1000. It’s a game that’s fallen through a time hole from the future and contains technology that can do absolutely anything to anyone, including that.

Why? It’s a nineteenth-stage capitalist thing. Something about gods of wealth, insatiable hunger and first-borns.

Well, in order to avoid JavaScript, it’s having to encode all seven possible block states for all possible cells of the 10×8×8 world, and they’ve chosen to use HTML “radio” buttons - a single element - to achieve this. Each radio option has its own label, which, rather than text, is a heavily stylised set of six objects that represent the sides of the cube, which only show up when their respective radio option is set.

7×10×8×8×(1+6) = 40320. The remainder of the lines are basically everything else.

In theory you could have JavaScript generate this on the fly directly into the DOM, and the “game” would still work without needing JavaScript to actually handle any of it, but since they’ve opted to avoid JavaScript altogether, they’ve obviously pre-generated the majority of it with some other language.

If DOSBox runs on one, then the old DOS-based Windows versions might work. But then, they didn’t keep much in System32, where they even had it at all.

OK, yeah, you can’t control a third party’s promises (or hallucinations), but the boss isn’t going to fire someone from sales and/or marketing. They’ll fire the developer for failing to deliver.

TBH, this is barely any different from marketing promising that a product will have a feature that the development team only find out about later purely by accident when upper management asks about it.

It’s the machine language monitor on the 40-column screen of the Commodore 128 (or, more likely, an emulator of the same). I had a whole part about that, BASIC DATA statements full of numbers, and about how anyone with any sense actually used an assembler even back then in an original draft of my comment, but decided to keep it brief.

It looks like they’re going for “machine code” being directly putting numbers in memory, but if you know what you’re doing that’s pretty much just assembly in an obscure op-code dialect.

You don’t know how to do something in raw JavaScript. You’re not even sure you should. You find a library / module / package / whatever-the-name-is-this-week on the Internet. You paste it into your code. Your code now works. Your code is now 1MB larger. This web app is heavy, man.

Wait until you learn that postfix conditionals are syntactic sugar and the compiler* turns that line into the equivalent of $debug and print(debug message), putting the conditional in first place, a lot like the ternary operator.

* Perl compiles to bytecode before running.

The ternary operator itself isn’t implemented in terms of and (and or) but it could be.

I think there’s a personality anti-correlation that keeps this mostly exclusive.

Serial killers tend to be more outgoing and active (to a troubling degree), whereas coders who create their own languages tend to be indoors types who don’t mind sitting in one place for long periods.

I mean there are plenty of psychologies that could make for someone who does both, but it would seem to reduce the odds a lot.

Ah. The usually implicit topical “this” didn’t even occur to me because I thought, er, this, was about objects. $_ isn’t used for those in Perl.

I suppose there might be some parallels with the implicit nature of $_ in non-OO contexts in Perl versus this in OO contexts in Javascript, but, at least to me, that feels pretty tenuous.

As at least one nautically themed childrens’ book surely has it: C is for crab.

Coming at programming sideways feels more like a Haskell or Prolog thing, though.

At the time JS was created, Perl didn’t have a this. A lot of the docs and books suggested using $self but a reference to the object would be passed as the first parameter to all class methods and you assign that to any name you wanted.

It’s only very recently (as in the last year or so) with a new class system that Perl has hard-coded $self for that purpose.

Not strictly true.

Perl’s default bitwise operators do differentiate between numbers and strings that look like numbers in a way that addition doesn’t*, and the readline/glob operator <> does different things depending on what (if anything) is between the signs.

There’s also the whole overload pragma for objects, which doesn’t affect default data types, but if you’re sufficiently perverse, you can define a String class that uses ‘+’ like JavaScript.

* in 2015, they added new operators so that those and the original operators don’t overload and have only one specific purpose if the bitwise pragma Edit: feature is turned on. You might know all this already though.

You’re right. I’ve got too much Perl on the brain and forgot my roots. There is a language that does what you’re talking about with the ‘+’ operator: BASIC

Good luck getting the same thing retrofitted into JavaScript though. I can imagine a large number of websites would break or develop mysterious problems if this (mis)behaviour was fixed.

Given it’s JavaScript, which was expressly designed to carry on regardless, I could see an argument for it returning NaN, (or silently doing what Perl does, like I mention in a different comment) but then there’d have to be an entirely different way of concatenating strings.