The OFFICIAL programming thread
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I didn’t understand any of that but still, fuck that guy!
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@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
I don’t know if I’m getting wiser or have just lost the energy to fight it (either way, I’m getting old) but re this comment he made:
Because this whole “I make up problems, and then I write overly complicated crap code to solve them” has to stop,.
I wouldn’t waste any energy on getting angry about that because it’s probably not in the guy’s nature to recognize he’s even doing it. Some people just do that - overcomplicate the fuck out of everything - and they couldn’t recognize the beauty in simplicity if it hit them in the head. Or they just don’t have the talent to see the real problem and they just keep furiously writing more and more code on top of failed approaches praying that the last fix on their fixes does the trick. I don’t know if you can change that either.
The two patterns I recognize in this direction are:
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Require indirection everywhere. Solve a problem by writing a universal class that solves all possible problems and specializing it for the actual problem at hand. It may work, but you will never use it for something else, you shouldn’t use it for something else, and the next person that comes along will have no idea what the hell it does in the first place.
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Think the problem is very simple. Write a logically wrong solution. Poke that solution with a stick until it is 7 times as long as you anticipated, calls itself recursively, and uses 3 external libraries someone on stack overflow has told you about. The right solution was to scrap it, doodle a bit on paper, and write completely new, short, and correct code.
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Linus and Steve should try solving this in a cage fight.
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@Pakoon said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
Linus and Steve should try solving this in a cage fight.
lol, no joke, this is Steve:

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@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
@Pakoon said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
Linus and Steve should try solving this in a cage fight.
lol, no joke, this is Steve:

Hmm in code fu likely Linus wins, but not actually fighting. Unless the penguins mass for him.
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Linus’s wife was a black belt karate instructor, maybe she has taught Linus some tricks.
I attended a few of her lessons when I was 14 or something.
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@Kilemall said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
Unless the penguins mass for him.
I hate that penguin. I wish they’d stop infantilizing the Linux brand with that stupid thing.
Steve doesn’t hate it apparently since this is his GitHub avatar:

I’m feeling sorry for Steve now that I’ve looked him up. He’s obviously not a newbie nor a complete incompetent since he’s had hundreds or more commits merged into the kernel over the years by Torvalds. I’d struggle to just take destructive criticism like that in any setting, but to have my code called garbage (again) by someone as respected as Torvalds, in a public mailing list read by many thousands and then go viral so it was the first or second hit anytime someone searched my name…
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Fucking Indians!
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Would you like an orange squishy with that?
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Maybe related but I watched a vid a couple of days ago about how a lot of younger programmers think “contributing to open source” is a necessary box you have to check off if you want to get hired these days. That attitude is attracting a lot of low value contributions from people who otherwise have no interest in the project they are contributing to.
Re Indian programmers: The client I work for hired one of the many guys I interviewed for them late last year and he started a couple of weeks ago. He’s turning out to be great. He’s pretty switched on and although still a little green in some areas, he really gets it and he learns quick. It’s such a fucking relief after having to work with the so many mostly low quality programmers from the IT managed services firm they use. I used to try to train those guys up but they’d fucking quit all the time because the conditions they worked under were so bad and they had no real connection or loyalty to the client. It’s nice to be able to mentor this new guy and not be afraid I’m wasting my time. He’ll likely take over some of the work I’ve been doing when my contract is up so it will also be nice to know that stuff will be in good hands.
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@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
Maybe related but I watched a vid a couple of days ago about how it’s considered by a lot of younger programs that “contributing to open source” is a necessary box you have to tick off if you want to get hired these days. That attitude is attracting a lot of low value contributions from people who otherwise have no interest in the project they are contributing to.
Re Indian programmers: The client I work for hired one of the many guys I interviewed for them late last year and he started a couple of weeks ago. He’s turning out to be great. He’s pretty switched on and although still a little green in some areas, he really gets it and he learns quick. It’s such a fucking relief after having to work with the so many mostly low quality programmers from the IT managed services firm they use. I used to try to train those guys up but they’d fucking quit all the time because the conditions they worked under were so bad and they had no real connection or loyalty to the client. It’s nice to be able to mentor this new guy and not be afraid I’m wasting my time. He’ll likely take over the work I’ve been doing when my contract is up so it will also be nice to know that stuff will be in good hands.
Ya succession is on my mind nowadays.
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@Hog Apparently the blow up started with the “influencer” below. He was bitching about people trying to contribute to open source to buff their resumes or even get a free tshirt. So he posted a video about it that didn’t target Indians, but that spawned other videos and comments about Indians because they are significant offenders apparently. So then the influencer had to make another video saying “no racis” and then showing an Indian video teaching these people to go make contributions but half assed, like commenting their name in the code to get credit for the commit. There are some good Indian coders that I have worked with, but at the upper end I tend to hate working with their management and consultants (actually from India, not Americanized). It’s more a cultural issue than technical.
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We dealt with the Tata people in the 80s when they were first starting out, and there is a SE Asian sub village in one of our analyst kingdoms. You end up dealing with their caste type stuff no matter what you do to step on it.
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I deal with tatas daily
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@Zeppelin said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:
I deal with tatas daily
Indian programmers? Not sure how they would help ranching.
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TATA makes Jaguar, and Land Rover.
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Poor Zep.

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NSFW: Language warning
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Snippet of an email I just sent:
Having reviewed the changes on (redacted) in conjunction with the reference (redacted), I don’t believe it will cause a problem when migrated to production.
*I don’t believe". Urgh.
I believe there’s a fucking problem with our system landscape and testing methodology if it requires me to make statements of faith about what is going to happen when changes are migrated to production.
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As a person of faith, why not? Maybe end with “may the good lord bless you code”.
