Hacker News: mortalapeman

New comment by mortalapeman in "Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone"

mortalapeman — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:04:44 +0000

As a senior dev who has been using these tools to their fullest effectiveness in production environments, until AI can reduce the entropy of a codebase while still adding capability I will continue to be underwhelmed.

New comment by mortalapeman in "AngularJS Directive Design Made Easy"

mortalapeman — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 03:55:43 +0000

I partially agree, directives are not easy to learn, and there is not enough good documentation or literature on how to write them well. However, I have found the api to be very expressive , concise, and flexible once mastered. I can't say the same for most real languages I work with everyday.

New comment by mortalapeman in "AngularJS Directive Design Made Easy"

mortalapeman — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 03:49:27 +0000

The only reason one would use scope.$watch in this fashion is to have a function executed when a digest occurs. The original purpose of the $watch function is to take 2 functions, one that returns the watched value and another to be executed when that value changes. The fiddle provided is not a very good example of "reusable" directives. The fiddle could be rewritten to use a directive that adds or removes a given class based on a boolean, and the rest of the state could be handled by built in directives.

New comment by mortalapeman in "AngularJS Directive Design Made Easy"

mortalapeman — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 03:35:31 +0000

A single element cannot have more than once isolated scope. It only makes sense to use an isolated scope when a directive has a template associated with it. Otherwise, one should rely on the $parse + the "attrs" object + $scope.$watch to correctly handle expressions.

New comment by mortalapeman in "AngularJS Directive Design Made Easy"

mortalapeman — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 03:31:46 +0000

Directives are a DSL for creating new behavior using HTML. Once you learn the language, the symbols make sense and directives are easy to read. I think you are confusing "intuitive" with "familiar". Since you are not familiar with directives, you do not find them intuitive.