Anthony D. Green

Current VB enthusiast & vigilante. Former Language Designer & PM for @ Microsoft. Support me on Patreon:

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

A 59-page visual guide to what I'm doing with the VB language/compiler for ModVB. Hopefully this is the right height to let folks see the scale of the forest. It took a month to write. AFK for the rest of the day.

https://t.co/PhSE7Etp0P

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@PipitsBoyfriend @WarriorOfDx Sometimes me or my friend will imitate (affectionately) Zelda's Japanese voice acting in BotW. Zeruda is always dreamily calling him Rinku at the beginning of some cutscene and we think it's cute.

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

Has anyone else also decided lately that they're okay forfeiting all "more personally relevant" ads forever in exchange for never having to answer these questions again? How much worse would my life be having to actively look for crap to buy? Spent just fine before the cookies.

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@raetay1yahoo And they rarely use Teams. The chief medical officer and chief of engineering have to take the lift to join the bridge crew. They have faster than light travel but not work-from-quarters culture. Fascinating.

Next time on ST: RTO

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@rod_mallo I'd be happy just using more of these doors they're so damn proud to tell me about. Or 3 columns of 2 instead of 2 of 3. Back to front. Window seats first. Really any effort at all to improve the quality of my experience.

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

After a certain point in a game I feel bad attacking "natural" creatures no longer a threat to me. Monster Hunter Rise felt abusive. Stealth attacking a camp of sleeping Bokoblins or attacking them when they're just looking for food. I can't 100% Xenoblade X. Am I weird?

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@GlennAndTonic It was a picture book of interesting stuff from all over the world that you could jump around in. How could one not explore those pages!?

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

I feel like we all just collectively decided never to keep ammonia in the same house and I think that's so wonderful. But because of that warning from childhood I'm always nervous about bleach mixing with anything else, like pine-sol. Soo scary. Safer to never clean.

[PUNS @ThePunnyWorld]

My son texted me: “I just spilled bleach and baking soda all over the floor. What do I do?”

I replied, “Throw a blanket over it.”

A minute later he texted back,
“Okay… now what?”

I said, “Nothing. All our bases are covered.”

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@MerriamWebster This came up in so many meetings throughout the years. In hindsight there is simply no need for a word for twice weekly. There are too many simpler ways to say it. "Our Tues/Thurs planning meeting", "Our 2x a week check-in". "Every other week" is cumbersome, bi-weekly is better.

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

Ok, to clarify my earlier colors were for the general subjects in primary school only. More specific courses vary.

Algebra can be green.
Biology can be red.
Chemistry is yellow.
Calculus might be orange.
Statistics could probably be red though.
Spanish is definitely red.

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

Does it mean something that that was my immediate first reaction to the picture? "Green isn't Math, it's Science!". Math is Blue but a different Blue from English. Social Studies it Red. Has this color coding of words and concepts phenomenon been studied?

[Staples @StaplesStores]

Real ones know that math is red

#backtoschool #school #notebook

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@OseznaGomez @StaplesStores See! This person gets it!

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

Sure it has... nice try...

[Matty McTech @setupspawn]

End of an era… 💔 After 14 years and 1.7 billion views, YouTube removed the original Rick Roll. 😢

https://t.co/BpDmQVJswD

Let your friends know.

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@ereliuer_eteer

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@ereliuer_eteer "Okay, but the measurement is becoming true!"

-Me explaining how it wasn't fraud just prescience and overzealousness in my prior reports.

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@smod4real Reminds me of my favorite episode of Goof Troop!

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

I'd say the expectation is that an indexer is O(n) e.g. lists or O(log n) e.g. maps but never O(n).

I learned this particular lesson in 2008 when VB included an "extension default property/index" in the narrow scenario of XML inspection to enable an XPath like DSL experience:

`node.<ns:element>(1).@attribute`

That index is actually shorthand for `ElementAtOrDefault(1)`. For the scenario of querying XML documents quickly it's might be an ok once for small documents in utilities but a huge mistake for basically all other types or if used in a `for` loop.

`node...<descendants>(i).Value`

The IDE explicitly shows IntelliSense for ElementAtOrDefault when this is happening both while you're writing and on hover, and I often consider other mitigations but that just supports your argument that this is a subtle foot-gun.

Given that experience I'm surprised this is the exact scenario they chose for an extension indexer and that's actually worse because unlike the VB shorthand where the remapping to `ElementAtOrDefault` (with its well-known performance characteristics) is trivially discoverable to tooling, the definited extension indexer actually encapsulates/hides the detail of its implementation. Neither tooling nor the programmer can understand without access to the source.

FWIW, I wrestled with this kind of design decision again with JSON. JsonElement lacks a string indexer so you can't write `je["first-name"]` on it. I could get around this easily, particularly in VB where I "always" could have used the aforementioned language rule to define an extension indexer, but have thusfar decided to honor the library author's intention and not do so for a sleek demo.

tl;dr - if I squint I can contrive an extremely narrow case where it's slightly prettier in the privacy of my own home but not one I would openly tell folks about in the docs.

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@miradreaamy It is... vexxing that 5 + 1 = 10 regardless of which of my first or second guesses I apply. Very vexxing. I'm holding to my first answer though because it's more interesting (to me).

[Anthony D. Green @ThatVBGuy]

@miradreaamy The first few (3-4) comments I saw were deemed wrong answers but we're also not mine or near mine. Now I am invested competitively and will await your judgement before looking at other replies.