The OFFICIAL programming thread

Hog

Some people on a podcast I was watching the other day said there are a staggering number of people who right-click to copy and again to paste because they don’t know about Ctrl-C/V. I found that kind of mind blowing but then I thought, who would have taught them? Unless I’m mistaken, most Windows programs don’t show the shortcut keys in the menu like a lot of programs used to do so they’d never have been told.

But then about 95% of my computer skills come from laziness and from thinking, “Having to expend this trivial effort over an over again is annoying, there has to be an easier way” and then going to find that way.

eWildcat

I’ve taught a fair number of people in my administrative job. And I have to concur : each time I took time to check if people knew the basic stuff, like Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C-X/V or how to select several files in a list. And every time it was fruitful. A lot of people, old or young, just do everything with right or left clicks, and are puzzled by how faster you do things before you explain it to them.
I think it’s obvious for the narrow generation that had to learn computers before Windows XP… not so much for others.

Gators1

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

I’m definitely a member of the keyboard > mouse club and I’m comfortable in terminal editors and tiling window managers but this is pretty hard core:

YouTube shorts: guy duct tapes his trackpad

I’ve never thought to even try to navigate websites using the keyboard. I think I always assumed it would just be slower and a PITA. Might have to try it out.

(Also, I couldn’t see what OS he was using on his phone but I’m presuming Linux with a tiling window manage. If so, it must be way easier to just disable the trackpad altogether via config and less ugly than taping over it.)

Maybe there isn’t a hotkey for the config and he doesn’t know what to do? I turned my trackpad off long ago, but use a wireless mouse. I do too much shit that needs a mouse to not have one.

Gustaf

Trackpads are for communists.

Hog

The macbook trackpads are pretty good. I don’t miss a mouse when I’m using it and the 2 and 3 finger gestures are handy but I guess most of them have that now. I split my time between my Macbook and a Linux machine on my desk and there’s a lot of subtle shit going on with the macbook that I noticed today in particular working on the same game on both machines. Apple do a bunch of shit (interpolation and smoothing) even with just vertically sliding two fingers for scale/zooming that makes it feel really nice. It was jarring how bad using a mouse was when I when I got back to my desk and started rolling the mousewheel for the same function.

Kilemall

@eWildcat said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

I’ve taught a fair number of people in my administrative job. And I have to concur : each time I took time to check if people knew the basic stuff, like Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C-X/V or how to select several files in a list. And every time it was fruitful. A lot of people, old or young, just do everything with right or left clicks, and are puzzled by how faster you do things before you explain it to them.
I think it’s obvious for the narrow generation that had to learn computers before Windows XP… not so much for others.

They are disabling a lot of those forcing you to click.

eWildcat

It’s unfortunately true. I guess in some part to make it easier to have compatibiliy with touch-sensitive devices. Yet, in what I do, being able to work faster in the basic Windows environment (browser, Word and Excel) is still useful.

Gators1

So this company accidentally fired everyone including the CEO becase someone fucked up the test. Given they are testing firing people on Slack, would you even go back when you found out it was a mistake?

oyaji

"The stock dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody - we’re all unemployed!’

BRAWNDO stocks plummet - Idiocracy clip

Hog

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@eWildcat said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

I’ve taught a fair number of people in my administrative job. And I have to concur : each time I took time to check if people knew the basic stuff, like Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C-X/V or how to select several files in a list. And every time it was fruitful. A lot of people, old or young, just do everything with right or left clicks, and are puzzled by how faster you do things before you explain it to them.
I think it’s obvious for the narrow generation that had to learn computers before Windows XP… not so much for others.

They are disabling a lot of those forcing you to click.

What, really?

Traditionally, Linux has had multiple key combinations for copy / paste. Your desktop, windows-like environment has Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v. In the terminal Ctrl-c is cancel though so it’s Ctrl-Shift-c, Ctrl-Shift-v. For some reason that didn’t always work so you also had Ctrl-Insert (copy), Shift-Insert (paste). Then in Vim it’s y (yank instead of copy) and p to paste but that’s not the same clipboard as your desktop. You had to prefix those commands with "* if you want to copy / paste between other apps. In Emacs, copy and paste is Ctrl-w (copy) and Ctrl-y (yank). Except what they call yank in Emacs is pasting, not copying.

Above sounds as confusing as fuck because it is but it’s not something normal users would ever have to care about. Ctrl-c / Ctrl-v work just fine in any gui app they’d use as does right-click for the menu options.

Gators1

Sounds like Linux sucks.

Hog

Yeah it does. Just not as much as windows.

Hog

I think I’ve got to get out of JavaScript development.

I have a custom built accounting system that I don’t keep running anywhere because I mostly only use it once year to do my end of year books and taxes. If I do have to look something up or answer a query, I’ve got to set it up again and restore the data from backups. That part isn’t the problem. The problem is that the JavaScript world gives zero fucks about backward compatibility and the word “stable” is like a foreign concept to them. So the one to three times a year I do have to set it up my accounts sytem again, my stomach is in my throat as I figure out what’s been deprecated and can no longer even be fucking downloaded any more from CDNs. I never know if I’m going to have to change one or two lines of code (usually) or completely rewrite some component that doesn’t work anymore.

Contrast that with something like the Dart language which I’ve been playing with this week: it is backwards compatible to version one, includes a huge amount of stuff in their standard libraries (so that is also backwards compatible) and it means you can find a 7 year old Dart tutorial using similarly aged packages and your code will just fucking work.

I’m hardly one to be against progress but it’s like the JavaScript world has some shared disease. Whole JavaScript frameworks have come and gone in 7 years and good fucking luck just running code from even a year ago without having to fuck around with fixing breaking changes.

/rant

Kilemall

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

I think I’ve got to get out of JavaScript development.

I have a custom built accounting system that I don’t keep running anywhere because I mostly only use it once year to do my end of year books and taxes. If I do have to look something up or answer a query, I’ve got to set it up again and restore the data from backups. That part isn’t the problem. The problem is that the JavaScript world gives zero fucks about backward compatibility and the word “stable” is like a foreign concept to them. So the one to three times a year I do have to set it up my accounts sytem again, my stomach is in my throat as I figure out what’s been deprecated and can no longer even be fucking downloaded any more from CDNs. I never know if I’m going to have to change one or two lines of code (usually) or completely rewrite some component that doesn’t work anymore.

Contrast that with something like the Dart language which I’ve been playing with this week: it is backwards compatible to version one, includes a huge amount of stuff in their standard libraries (so that is also backwards compatible) and it means you can find a 7 year old Dart tutorial using similarly aged packages and your code will just fucking work.

I’m hardly one to be against progress but it’s like the JavaScript world has some shared disease. Whole JavaScript frameworks have come and gone in 7 years and good fucking luck just running code from even a year ago without having to fuck around with fixing breaking changes.

/rant

Mainframes. Ya.

We were running compiled code, the term is load module, from 1989. The programmer is dead, we asked.

I used to have to deal with a coelacanth disk format supporting an ancient concept, basically all print output stored in a dataset for the 1-2 days it’s out there to be referenced. This thing has to literally have been from the moon shot program.

Basic direct access method - Wikipedia

JES2 and JES3 is the job resource system IBM mainframes still use, it definitely is an artifact of the moon shot program and still has status/error messages called HASP, literally Houston Aerospace.

MVS Job Entry Subsystems - Wikipedia

Hog

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

We were running compiled code, the term is load module, from 1989. The programmer is dead, we asked.

I feel bad that that made me laugh.

Kilemall

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

We were running compiled code, the term is load module, from 1989. The programmer is dead, we asked.

I feel bad that that made me laugh.

It’s the right reaction.

Hog

@Kilemall Have you seen any promotion or use of AI translation tools for old codebases? I’m definitely not promoting them (my own experience with AI code generation has been less than great - especially on non-trivial stuff), I just keep hearing how they’re going to save us from the massive problem of old COBOL programmers dying off with no one with the skills to replace them.

Kilemall

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Kilemall Have you seen any promotion or use of AI translation tools for old codebases? I’m definitely not promoting them (my own experience with AI code generation has been less than great - especially on non-trivial stuff), I just keep hearing how they’re going to save us from massive problem of old COBOL programmers dying off with no one with the skills to replace them.

I hear about it, I don’t believe it, just cause there are going to be so many gotchas built into very human code and environmental/tribal assumptions that stuff was written under. Better off using AI to assess it then rewrite into a new codebase with strict structures the AI can reliably dev for.

oyaji

When did they start requiring programmers to document their programs and begin accumulating libraries of procedures that other people might pirate in the future?

Rightly recognizing the potential for that, I deliberately refused and obfuscated. I know that I was not the only one. Is that why, 50 years later, COBOL is such a mess?

To those early programmers, I say “good for you”.

Kilemall

@oyaji said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

When did they start requiring programmers to document their programs, and start building libraries of procedures?

Theoretically from the beginning, but many don’t due to time/cost pressures or not wanting to be replaceable.

I am sometimes asked to do things that meets management goals not what is best and those won’t be documented.