The OFFICIAL programming thread

Programming with pictures

Back in the late 90’s I demonstrated a graphical workflow tool I was using to a colleague and he dubbed it “programming with pictures”. Later, similar tools started appearing in most 3D applications like Blender and Godot. Except there they call them “node editors”.

Anyway, just now I wanted to temporarily backdrop something I’m working on in Blender with a tiled floor and I thought, oh that would be a good case for using shader nodes. So I started building it and got this far before I had a problem:

The problem was that I needed a logical XOR operation on the output of the Column and Row. ie, if either the column or the row is odd (edit: but only one of them), then use the alternate color. But, surprisingly to me, I found out that Blender doesn’t have a node for boolean logic. I could have written some python code to do it but that seemed like cheating so I thought about for a bit before I realized I could add the row and column remainder and then do another modulo operation on it:

Fucking Bingo! My math skills are so rudimentary that I felt like Plato after I reasoned out that solution.

Gators1

Flow graphs are pretty common in the data world as well. Our data movement tool, informatica, uses them at a couple levels to define the mapping of one column to another column and the process of when to run mappings in sequence. It is funny though how such tools often complicate something you could do easily in code. We ended up using a ton of SQL overrides in the ETL because we couldn’t be arsed to spell it out with all the boxes and lines, or in some cases you couldn’t even do it the way we wanted it.

I have something similar to your OR problem quite often actually. Our report creation tool, which is basically a SQL GUI can’t easily do the order of operations in the equivalent of the WHERE clause. So I get tripped up when I want to do something like WHERE (A=1 AND B=0) OR (A=0 AND B=1). It has AND and OR but to create the parentheses I have to create new filter objects with the AND conditions, which is a different GUI, and then use those objects in the report definition. It’s not a huge inconvenience as you can create them pretty quickly, but it does tend to clutter up the application when you have to create a bunch of these and you have duplicates over time.

Kilemall

@gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Flow graphs are pretty common in the data world as well. Our data movement tool, informatica, uses them at a couple levels to define the mapping of one column to another column and the process of when to run mappings in sequence. It is funny though how such tools often complicate something you could do easily in code. We ended up using a ton of SQL overrides in the ETL because we couldn’t be arsed to spell it out with all the boxes and lines, or in some cases you couldn’t even do it the way we wanted it.

I have something similar to your OR problem quite often actually. Our report creation tool, which is basically a SQL GUI can’t easily do the order of operations in the equivalent of the WHERE clause. So I get tripped up when I want to do something like WHERE (A=1 AND B=0) OR (A=0 AND B=1). It has AND and OR but to create the parentheses I have to create new filter objects with the AND conditions, which is a different GUI, and then use those objects in the report definition. It’s not a huge inconvenience as you can create them pretty quickly, but it does tend to clutter up the application when you have to create a bunch of these and you have duplicates over time.

The ugly part is under the covers you are probably adding 1000s of junky operations/instructions per decision/branch cycle where if they had the options you need in, your stuff would run faster.

In that case they are looking to save devbucks and making you pay for their profit margin by buying more computer.

Gators1

@kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Flow graphs are pretty common in the data world as well. Our data movement tool, informatica, uses them at a couple levels to define the mapping of one column to another column and the process of when to run mappings in sequence. It is funny though how such tools often complicate something you could do easily in code. We ended up using a ton of SQL overrides in the ETL because we couldn’t be arsed to spell it out with all the boxes and lines, or in some cases you couldn’t even do it the way we wanted it.

I have something similar to your OR problem quite often actually. Our report creation tool, which is basically a SQL GUI can’t easily do the order of operations in the equivalent of the WHERE clause. So I get tripped up when I want to do something like WHERE (A=1 AND B=0) OR (A=0 AND B=1). It has AND and OR but to create the parentheses I have to create new filter objects with the AND conditions, which is a different GUI, and then use those objects in the report definition. It’s not a huge inconvenience as you can create them pretty quickly, but it does tend to clutter up the application when you have to create a bunch of these and you have duplicates over time.

The ugly part is under the covers you are probably adding 1000s of junky operations/instructions per decision/branch cycle where if they had the options you need in, your stuff would run faster.

In that case they are looking to save devbucks and making you pay for their profit margin by buying more computer.

In some cases yeah, but in ours I don’t think so. Data movement is all about efficiency so our software actually has some optimizations over straight SQL that speed it up for common operations. Some super genius data engineer probably could get it to run faster with straight code and some caching functions or whatever, but that adds a shitload of development/ops overhead. Also devbucks are generally more important than having to buy hardware in the long run. If you had a hand code an ETL in SQL vs. using a pretty drag and drop interface, the development investment and operating costs would be a huge difference.

tigger

@gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Flow graphs are pretty common in the data world as well. Our data movement tool, informatica, uses them at a couple levels to define the mapping of one column to another column and the process of when to run mappings in sequence. It is funny though how such tools often complicate something you could do easily in code. We ended up using a ton of SQL overrides in the ETL because we couldn’t be arsed to spell it out with all the boxes and lines, or in some cases you couldn’t even do it the way we wanted it.

I have something similar to your OR problem quite often actually. Our report creation tool, which is basically a SQL GUI can’t easily do the order of operations in the equivalent of the WHERE clause. So I get tripped up when I want to do something like WHERE (A=1 AND B=0) OR (A=0 AND B=1). It has AND and OR but to create the parentheses I have to create new filter objects with the AND conditions, which is a different GUI, and then use those objects in the report definition. It’s not a huge inconvenience as you can create them pretty quickly, but it does tend to clutter up the application when you have to create a bunch of these and you have duplicates over time.

… And it can’t just do where A!=B?

Gators1

@tigger said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Flow graphs are pretty common in the data world as well. Our data movement tool, informatica, uses them at a couple levels to define the mapping of one column to another column and the process of when to run mappings in sequence. It is funny though how such tools often complicate something you could do easily in code. We ended up using a ton of SQL overrides in the ETL because we couldn’t be arsed to spell it out with all the boxes and lines, or in some cases you couldn’t even do it the way we wanted it.

I have something similar to your OR problem quite often actually. Our report creation tool, which is basically a SQL GUI can’t easily do the order of operations in the equivalent of the WHERE clause. So I get tripped up when I want to do something like WHERE (A=1 AND B=0) OR (A=0 AND B=1). It has AND and OR but to create the parentheses I have to create new filter objects with the AND conditions, which is a different GUI, and then use those objects in the report definition. It’s not a huge inconvenience as you can create them pretty quickly, but it does tend to clutter up the application when you have to create a bunch of these and you have duplicates over time.

… And it can’t just do where A!=B?

No because A could be 2 and B could be 3. The point is that in general you have to do the operations in parentheses in a different way than the rest of the where clause in the GUI. So it makes it harder to do complex where clauses than with just coding.

Gators1

This is the nerdiest thread on the front page, so I will drop this here.

How Motherboards Work - Turbo Nerd Edition

Tazz

@gators1 Cool video. It’s amazing how clean and uncluttered todays mobo’s look compared to the first one I bought back around 1991 when I first assembled a PC.

Kilemall

@gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

This is the nerdiest thread on the front page, so I will drop this here.

How Motherboards Work - Turbo Nerd Edition

I reject your nerdshaming!

Gators1

@kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

This is the nerdiest thread on the front page, so I will drop this here.

How Motherboards Work - Turbo Nerd Edition

I reject your nerdshaming!

I am not shaming…it’s good info!

Lob12

@kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

This is the nerdiest thread on the front page, so I will drop this here.

How Motherboards Work - Turbo Nerd Edition

I reject your nerdshaming!

shuddup nerd

When I got into programming they didn’t tell me there’d be nightmares

- YouTube

Wingmann

Subscribed!

Gators1

@hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

When I got into programming they didn’t tell me there’d be nightmares

- YouTube

Can I get in on early alpha? How much for one of the streachy green guys?

@gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Can I get in on early alpha? How much for one of the streachy green guys?

That’s an NFT. Only 10 billion will be minted so I can’t let them go cheap.

@hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

When I got into programming they didn’t tell me there’d be nightmares

- YouTube

I can’t believe I’ve spent a week on this and without a satisfactory result. I mean, I’ve got it to a point where it’s way better than the above but it’s still not usable. To get to the point I’m at now, I’ve had to by trial and error and process of elimination:

Discover a bug in the engine (already reported on Github) and code around it
Discover that the documentation is not only wrong but actually misleading and caused half the problems in the original vid

The whole ragdoll physics feature in Godot is woefully undercooked which explains the dearth of internet resourses around it - ie no one is using it.

Anyway, as frustrating as it’s been. I’ve learned a bunch of stuff and the only thing I’ve lost is personal time. Hardest part is that I’m left without a solution that doesn’t require a major and costly change in approach.

This type of problem, although not common, terrifies me when it happens on a paid gig. It’s so fucking hard to explain to project managers and stakeholders what the hold up is and you feel like an incompetent idiot.

Well this will do. I’m not Rockstar Games and I’m not making an AAA title. There’s still some occasional mesh tearing issues but I’ll wait until I have the actual higher-poly game assets before I try and fine-tune it further.

- YouTube

tigger

@hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Well this will do. I’m not Rockstar Games and I’m not making an AAA title. There’s still some occasional mesh tearing issues but I’ll wait until I have the actual higher-poly game assets before I try and fine-tune it further.

- YouTube

You should team up with Jerraye and make an indie studio!

Gators1

Tigger could do the ai too! And Doc will be player relations because he’s great at that!

Jam

@hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Well this will do. I’m not Rockstar Games and I’m not making an AAA title. There’s still some occasional mesh tearing issues but I’ll wait until I have the actual higher-poly game assets before I try and fine-tune it further.

- YouTube

I like the:

“Nail Gumby’s Feet to the Floor”

version better!