Derek Lowe keeps a blog, that alone wouldn't be news worthy but his blog is the home of Things I Won't Work With, a fascinating look at chemicals so noxious, so volatile that even the names will make amateur chemists flinch.
Such things as:
Everyone knows hydrogen peroxide, HOOH. And if you know it, you also know that it's well-behaved in dilute solution, and progressively less so as it gets concentrated. The 30% solution will go to work immediately bleaching you out if you are so careless as to spill some on you, and the 70% solution, which I haven't seen in years, provides an occasion to break out the chain-mail gloves.
When we last checked in with the Klapƶtke lab at Munich, it was to highlight their accomplishments in the field of nitrotetrazole oxides. Never forget, the biggest accomplishment in such work is not blowing out the lab windows.
and FOOF
And a hard core it is! This stuff was first prepared in Germany in 1932 by Ruff and Menzel, who must have been likely lads indeed, because it's not like people didn't respect fluorine back then. No, elemental fluorine has commanded respect since well before anyone managed to isolate it, a process that took a good fifty years to work out in the 1800s. (The list of people who were blown up or poisoned while trying to do so is impressive). And that's at room temperature.
Has anyone here had to work with any of these?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12 2014, @03:27PM
Windows (Any Version)
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday November 13 2014, @08:34PM
Ruby very quickly made my list after I started trying to hack away at Diaspora the other night. What a nightmare.
Spent about ten minutes writing code...followed by several hours spent debugging whitespace. At that point I decided all I *really* needed to add to the Ruby code was one line to import some Javascript, and I could do all my hacks in pure JS. As bad as JS is, at least it's not whitespace sensitive.
Basically all whitespace sensitive languages are on my list of "things I won't work with"...
(Score: 1) by Paradise Pete on Friday November 14 2014, @04:11AM
Ruby is whitespace sensitive? In what way do you mean?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday November 14 2014, @01:11PM
Well, maybe not the Ruby itself, but all the associated content is (HAML and such). This is my first time dealing with Ruby so I don't know how much of that is standard and how much is just how Diaspora chose to do things.