The OFFICIAL programming thread

Kilemall

There was a utility program bundled in our app I supported that had a compile date of around 1987 and still worked in 2014. That’s mainframe baybee.

Gators1

Yrah but what kind of FPS does a mainframe have?

rote7

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Not worried about AI taking my job anytime soon.

There clearly is some looping going on in read_json_files.

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

There was a utility program bundled in our app I supported that had a compile date of around 1987 and still worked in 2014. That’s mainframe baybee.

There’s nothing wrong with old code if it works. But you could change that program if circumstances changed and recompile it. Not so easy with an ISA. I guess they could add even more instructions that supported unicode but they couldn’t remove the old ones without breaking who knows what.

Introducing Python in Excel

Ooh. It’s in beta but is coming to Excel soon I guess.

Jam

I watched the first 10 minutes of the video and found it riveting.

I felt like someone was trying to rivet my unwilling mind to the display!

It gets more interesting as it moves to the more elaborate benefits, but Excel already has all the features this boomer will ever need or want. ;-)

Tazz

I fell asleep

Gators1

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Introducing Python in Excel

Ooh. It’s in beta but is coming to Excel soon I guess.

That will be a huge step forward over VBA if you have any scripts in your worksheets. As a data professional though I am required to say Excel is old school boomer bullshit.

Gators1

@Jam said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Introducing Python in Excel

Ooh. It’s in beta but is coming to Excel soon I guess.

That will be a huge step forward over VBA if you have any scripts in your worksheets. As a data professional though I am required to say Excel is old school boomer bullshit.

That’s a very thinly disguised insult!

Even a boomer with failing eyesight can see what you did there!

Its kind of a meme in the data world how we can build a process to get you data super fast on a beautiful dashboard and the users always ask for it to be emailed in Excel.

Kilemall

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Jam said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Introducing Python in Excel

Ooh. It’s in beta but is coming to Excel soon I guess.

That will be a huge step forward over VBA if you have any scripts in your worksheets. As a data professional though I am required to say Excel is old school boomer bullshit.

That’s a very thinly disguised insult!

Even a boomer with failing eyesight can see what you did there!

Its kind of a meme in the data world how we can build a process to get you data super fast on a beautiful dashboard and the users always ask for it to be emailed in Excel.

The earlier was you’d send a Lotus and they want a green bar print out.

Multiplan by floppy if you are really old school.

Gators1

Thats old skool bro.

Jam

And I remember hearing about how Tazz was asked to take a charcoal parchment rubbing of his abacus calculations and send them out by carrier pigeon!

Edit: n/m

Tazz

@Jam said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

And I remember hearing about how Tazz was asked to take a charcoal parchment rubbing of his abacus calculations and send them out by carrier pigeon!

Interview with Senior Rust Developer

Don’t know if the whole video is worth it but this is a great line:

Ah, Rust is… imagine you would throw all advantages from all languages together. Now your code is unreadable. But it’s memory safe.

I like Rust but it requires a degree of masochism.

Last year the client I’m working for had one of the big IT managed services firms build them an app. They spent I don’t know how much on it but it would have cost a lot. However, It never got through UAT because it ran like shit - like minutes to open and minutes again to do some small task in it.

This year, I’d been asked to look at what could be done to optimize it. Fortunately or unfortunately I’ve been way too busy and was told to focus on my other tasks. Anyway, it came to a head recently where they had to make a call to let the same programmers have another go at trying to get it to run, rewrite it from scratch using basically similar technology or write it in something else altogether. They decided to my great joy they were going to rewrite it altogether in another technology. The first reason for the joy is that, despite not having been given time to actually look at and optimize the existing app, I keep getting dragged into dozens of meetings about the fucking thing, the time cost of which just puts more pressure on me for my assigned work. The second reason is that if they’d got it working, I’d have to integrate its functionality into several other apps that I’m currently responsible for and, having briefly looked at the code, I knew it was a fucking mess. Plus, my existing deadlines are fixed and it would cost me more time I don’t have. Rewriting it from the ground up in some other tech would free me of the fucking thing forever.

Then today, while solving a completely different problem, I learned a technique that could potentially resolve the biggest cause of the above apps slowness. I wrote a message to my boss saying “I don’t want to open a can of worms, but I’ve learned this thing today…”. When I saw that it was sitting on unread a couple of hours later, temptation got the better of me and I deleted the message.

Faarrrrrk. I was off the hook. I don’t have time for this bloody app to keep sucking away time and energy while my I run smack into my own deadlines.

Gators1

Oh you fucking dodged a bullet there Mr Expert. Never give them ideas or you will end up owning the rewrite because you know so much about it. That’s my own particular hell right now and probably will lead me to leve the company before the year is over.

Kilemall

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Oh you fucking dodged a bullet there Mr Expert. Never give them ideas or you will end up owning the rewrite because you know so much about it. That’s my own particular hell right now and probably will lead me to leve the company before the year is over.

You can never leave the IT SME ghetto.

Gators1

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

Oh you fucking dodged a bullet there Mr Expert. Never give them ideas or you will end up owning the rewrite because you know so much about it. That’s my own particular hell right now and probably will lead me to leve the company before the year is over.

You can never leave the IT SME ghetto.

You can if you learn to STFU, which I apparently can’t do.

Gators1

SME = subject matter expert. You are the one with all the knowledge that the company needs to keep running in your area, but you normally don’t get compensated for the value you contribute. Fortunately I do more or less.

We had a reorg and the new management isn’t great. My new boss is a complete moron, not having the technical knowledge to do the job or even any management skills whatsoever. He basically delegated day to day management of the group to me and has no clue what we are doing. A couple weeks ago after hours right before we were both about to go on vacation, we had a teams conversation where he announced he was going to delegate this massive cloud migration/rebuild/refactor project to me while he “concentrates on the big picture and governance”. As you would expect I had a lot of filthy language to say about that, but didn’t respond on the chat. We have not discussed it but my answer is going to be no given that’s his fucking job and it’s too big an ask. So it might be coming to a head for me and at this point I really don’t care if they fire me. I would like to make to to November because they gave me a nice equity bonus that vests then. After that I will probably just quit on my own. If I had just STFU from the start and just asked him what he wanted me to do all the time, then he would be fired already and maybe I wouldn’t be in this position.