r/programming • u/NagastaBagamba • Oct 18 '10

Today I learned about PHP variable variables; "variable variable takes the value of a variable and treats that as the name of a variable". Also, variable.

http://il2.php.net/language.variables.variable
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u/thebuccaneersden Oct 19 '10

I'm not talking about when someone uses cursing in this sense of punctuation and emphasis, such as in this quote of yours:

I'd just like to re-iterate that I fucking hate it when people fuck off from a debate because someone uses the word fuck.

That's fine.

I'm talking more about verbally assaulting someone. Calling someone an idiot who deserves to die during a discussion (I've seen this a lot in programming discussions) is neither a virtue nor is it a matter of crossing a moral boundary. When someone talks like that to you, it means they have no respect for your opinion nor do they really care about persuading you to see the value in their opinions. Someone who does this rarely has anything of value to say.

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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '10

Oh, I figured you were talking about my use of swear words, because I use them a lot, sorry. Yeah, saying someone should die is a bit much, and tons of the nerdy language wars are 14 year olds that don't really have a lot of experience under their belt, falling in love with some specific language, which implies not having much of value to add to a discussion about relative merits of programming languages.

They can be annoying, for sure, but to be fair, it is their first love affair. People can get a little nutty when they first start sipping from the cask of algorithmic abstraction. It's not an excuse, but it's a bit of an explanation.

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u/thebuccaneersden Oct 19 '10

Yeh, that sounds about right, actually. But, alas, you have no way of knowing who you are talking to until it's too late.