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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Sisters Euclid. They were a Canadian band who recently called it a career after like 27 years of mostly-under-the-radar instrumental jangle jazz, or something to that effect. They did win a Juno for an album of Neil Young instrumentals and reinterpretations called “Run Neil Run”, but outside of the Toronto are and southwest Ontario I don’t think they were widely known. Members of the band have played in all sorts of other bands and with other folks, many of which y’all would recognize like Norah Jones and the Doobie Brothers, they all really accomplished musicians. I saw them live dozens of times before they called it a day, and I always saw and heard something new with every performance. Seeing them live was definitely the best way to take them in, as their studio albums seemed like they were just scaffolding for the live shows.

    Hoping for a reunion show in 5-10 years. I’d travel for it.

    https://sisterseuclid.bandcamp.com/


















  • The code in the image is C or C++ or similar. In those languages and languages derived from them, curly braces are optional but the parentheses are required. It should be the other way around to avoid logic errors like this:

    if (some expression)
      doSomething()
    else if (some other expression)
      printf(“some debugging code that’s only here temporarily”);
      doSomethingElse();
    

    Based on the indentation you’d think that doSomethingElse was only meant to run if the else if condition was true, but because of the lack of braces and the printf it actually happens regardless of either of the if conditions. This can sometimes lead to logic errors and it doesn’t hold up to a principle of durability under edit — that is, inserting some code into the if statement changes the outcome entirely because it changes the code path entirely, so the code is in a sense fragile to edits. If the curly braces were required instead of optional, this wouldn’t happen.

    I have all of my linters set up to flag a lack of curly braces in these languages as an error because of this. It’s a topic that sometimes causes some debate, ‘cause some people will vociferously defend their right to not have the braces there for one liners and more compact code, but I have found that in general having them be required consistently has led to fewer issues than having arguments about their absence, but to each their own. I know many big projects that have the opposite stance or have other guidelines, but I just make ‘em required on my own projects or projects that I’m in charge of and be done with it.