The OFFICIAL programming thread

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.

oyaji

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@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.

You know, as an engineer I had to take at least 2 programming languages as part of my curriculum. (I ended up taking more, because I liked it.)

The idea was that I should know how to make my own programs in case I ever needed to use a computer. (Pocket calculators were a step up from the slide rules I was taught to use, so this is going back a ways.)

So since I wrote programs for my own use, I resented being penalized in my assignments for failing to document. I complained to teachers, who by standing their ground just pissed me off all the more.

Weasels and blockheads, the lot of 'em.

Kilemall

@oyaji said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@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.

You know, as an engineer I had to take at least 2 programming languages as part of my curriculum. (I ended up taking more, because I liked it.)

The idea was that I should know how to make my own programs in case I ever needed to use a computer. (Pocket calculators were a step up from the slide rules I was taught to use, so this is going back a ways.)

So since I wrote programs for my own use, I resented being penalized in my assignments for failing to document. I complained to teachers, who by standing their ground just pissed me off all the more.

Weasels and blockheads, the lot of 'em.

Dad wrote programs for sims in the 70s, key to at least one patent.

Gators1

@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

If I didn’t already know you want to rewrite the whole thing in a different language because that’s what you do for fun, I would suggest throwing it all in a container. Freeze the java version and dependencies and it keeps running forever.

Hog

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

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.

That was a brain fart. I was talking about Go in the above, not Dart. I dunno where “Dart” came from since I haven’t touched that in a couple of months. The only thing they have in common is that they are both languages created by Google.

Like every language, Go has some warts and weirdness. The use of capatilization to determine privacy for example is a very weird choice. E.g. “position” is a private member, “Position” is public. Had to laugh after stumbling across the below maybe a day after having a similar but less violent reaction to the idea:

YT Shorts: Primagen. Golang is great and here’s why I hate it

Kilemall

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

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.

That was a brain fart. I was talking about Go in the above, not Dart. I dunno where “Dart” came from since I haven’t touched that in a couple of months. The only thing they have in common is that they are both languages created by Google.

Like every language, Go has some warts and weirdness. The use of capatilization to determine privacy for example is a very weird choice. E.g. “position” is a private member, “Position” is public. Had to laugh after stumbling across the below maybe a day after having a similar but less violent reaction to the idea:

YT Shorts: Primagen. Golang is great and here’s why I hate it

Sounds like a UNIX supremacist conceit.

Hog

@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

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.

That was a brain fart. I was talking about Go in the above, not Dart. I dunno where “Dart” came from since I haven’t touched that in a couple of months. The only thing they have in common is that they are both languages created by Google.

Like every language, Go has some warts and weirdness. The use of capatilization to determine privacy for example is a very weird choice. E.g. “position” is a private member, “Position” is public. Had to laugh after stumbling across the below maybe a day after having a similar but less violent reaction to the idea:

YT Shorts: Primagen. Golang is great and here’s why I hate it

Sounds like a UNIX supremacist conceit.

You talking about file paths/names being case-sensitve in *nix when traditionally they weren’t in other operating systems?

I think it’s just a concession to the lazy or slow typists. Instead of typing “pub foo” or “public foo” you get to write “Foo” and save yourself some keystrokes. Golang seems to attract people that are like that - there’s a hella lot of example Go code floating around with one letter variable names for instance.

I’m down with x,y and i,j being used in loops but I would reject any other use of it if I were doing a code review in any other language. Some poor dev shouldn’t have to figure out wtf “m” stands for when they are supporting your program that just fell over in production at 3 am.

Hog

A 10x faster TypeScript

Was just watching the above (few month old) vid where they announced the rewrite of the TypeScript compiler from JavaScript to Go and are getting a 10x performance increase. They demonstrated how the current TypeScript compiler takes 63 seconds to compile the whole VS Code codebase from scratch whereas the Go version only takes 6 seconds. Whole thing sounds great yadda yadda and I’m sure the 10x speed increase is very welcome but I’m just awestruck how the JavaScript version can compile 1.5 million lines of code in 4,500 files in only 60 seconds which was obviously not the point of the demo.

Hog

Thought this from the front page of Hacker News today was interesting:

AI World Clocks

It’s a website that, every minute, asks 9 AI models (including GPT5, GPT4) to generate minimal code to show an analog clock with the correct, current time. Since it changes every sixty seconds, I can’t tell what it will look like when you click the link but the couple of times I tried it, only one of the nine clocks was accurate and some were barely recognizable as clocks. Interestingly, the AI model that succeeded in the task one minute failed the next minute and a different, previously failing, AI model succeeded so it wasn’t even possible to say, oh XYZ model is the best.

I asked Gemini if the task limits and overall prompt were fair for testing different AI model’s code generation abilities and Gemini snitched on its friends and said the task was demanding but fair.

Hog

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

it wasn’t even possible to say, oh XYZ model is the best.

Looking at the hacker news comments and also viewing the clocks myself over several minutes, it seems like the Kimi K2 model is the most often correct. It still fails sometimes but not as often as the others. GPT5 or DeepSeek v3.1 might be second.