The OFFICIAL programming thread

Tazz

@Jam said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

So . . . .

SQL was initially developed at IBM by Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce. It was initially called “Structured English Query Language” (SEQUEL) and pronounced “sequel”, though it later had to have it’s name shortened to “Structured Query Language” (SQL) due to trademark issues. It was created to supplant the then popular QUEL database language, and the name “sequel” was meant as a pun (it was the sequel to QUEL). However, this leads to the big question – was language still called “sequel” after the name change?

Answer here:

Pronouncing SQL: S-Q-L or Sequel?

So, it turns out that My Ess-Cue-Elle is the more official way to pronounce MySQL. We work with the Oracle MySQL team a couple times a year and that is how they say it.

Depends on its pronoun

Jam

I suppose in a way that is true.

It can be My Ess Q El, but it can be your My Sequel, or vice-versa, lol,

Kilemall

It’s used interchangeably in my department.

Tazz

@Kilemall I’m sure this news is making its rounds in the medical field. How is this even possible?

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/houston-hospital-halts-liver-and-kidney-transplants-after-learning-a-doctor-manipulated-some-records/

Gators1

Kilemall

@Tazz said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Kilemall I’m sure this news is making its rounds in the medical field. How is this even possible?

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/houston-hospital-halts-liver-and-kidney-transplants-after-learning-a-doctor-manipulated-some-records/

Doctors are to the medical field as fighter pilots to air forces. They are watched like hawks though by hospitals for things like this, note they saw higher failure rates so probably a QA oversight software trigger caught him. Usually it’s going to be a problem like physicians prescribing themselves drugs that causes lower outcomes, this twist was probably a surprise.

From a software security perspective, if he was running the transplant program he would have legit access to make changes.

So the combo of fighter pilot carte Blanche, a trusted physician with access, and time for the outcomes to trigger review explains it to me.

Pakoon

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

The My part is pronounced Myy. It’s a Swedish girl’s name.

One of the Moomin characters is My

Little My - Wikipedia

Gators1

Should you trust the government though?

US Government declares the safest programming language

It’s not a very ergonomic language despite their efforts to make it so but I got a lot out of learning Rust. The first weeks / months where you are fighting with the compiler as it teaches you Rust is the hardest but eventually it clicks and you stop trying to do things the “wrong” way. It’s worth it for how it opens your eyes to the pitfalls in other system languages because every time you get a compiler error you tend to think, “what’s the danger with that?” You usually figure it out and after a while you start feeling a growing horror at how potentially unsafe a lot of non-Rust code is.

Gators1

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

you start feeling a growing horror at how potentially unsafe a lot of non-Rust code is

That’s exactly what the government wants you to think! Meanwhile Rust was made by the NSA with all kinds of backdoors!!!

Kilemall

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

It’s not a very ergonomic language despite their efforts to make it so but I got a lot out of learning Rust. The first weeks / months where you are fighting with the compiler as it teaches you Rust is the hardest but eventually it clicks and you stop trying to do things the “wrong” way. It’s worth it for how it opens your eyes to the pitfalls in other system languages because every time you get a compiler error you tend to think, “what’s the danger with that?” You usually figure it out and after a while you start feeling a growing horror at how potentially unsafe a lot of non-Rust code is.

Mainframes win again- the OS locks the average peasant out of the dangerous instruction sets through APF authorization.

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-average-IBM-mainframe-application-inherently-more-secure-than-the-average-cloud-application-or-is-it-simply-security-through-obscurity

@Kilemall What Rust really addresses is a more a whole host of failure and attack vectors around memory. Not so much gatekeeping what a legit program can do.

This is 2019 data but it’s the type of thing Rust was designed to address:

Microsoft: 70 percent of all security bugs are memory safety issues

You can code safely in C and C++ but it takes both a lot of experience and immense amount of discipline and I’d be surprised if even the above-average developer had completely memory safe code in any large code base.

Pakoon

Is Baldwin behind this?

Kilemall

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Kilemall What Rust really addresses is a more a whole host of failure and attack vectors around memory. Not so much gatekeeping what a legit program can do.

This is 2019 data but it’s the type of thing Rust was designed to address:

Microsoft: 70 percent of all security bugs are memory safety issues

You can code safely in C and C++ but it takes both a lot of experience and immense amount of discipline and I’d be surprised if even the above-average developer had completely memory safe code in any large code base.

A better explanation of APF authorization…

What is the authorized program facility?

Because this security kicks in BEFORE the OS loads, if you screw up the libraries or the LPA you can literally lock the system up to where you cannot bring the system up. This is why you ALWAYS define a rescue LPAR that also has access to the same disks so you can fix the problems and come up without epic IBM assistance.

Gators1

@Kilemall what kind of FPS does your mainframe get though? Can it play Skyrim?

Kilemall

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Kilemall what kind of FPS does your mainframe get though? Can it play Skyrim?

I wouldn’t run game clients under z/OS but under a Linux LPAR. Not sure how you would get display though, pretty much no such thing as video card to monitor.

I think they could be awesome game servers with a main game server and VMs that run the players’ machines. They could interact with memory speed interfaces IBM has been working on for years, then you would have a thin client on the player’s machine.

Bit expensive though.

Gators1

Party is almost over. I guess I will take my savings and go be a tuk tuk taxi driver in Cambodia with Hog.

GitHub Copilot just got promoted to Captain

@Gators1

Gemini tells me there’s no need to fear (just yet).

The video then discusses the potential impact of Copilot Workspace on programmers. The video argues that Copilot Workspace is a productivity booster for experienced developers but can only build trivial things for the average person. In other words, Copilot Workspace is not going to make programmers obsolete but rather make them more productive.

The video ends with two reasons to be optimistic about the future of programmers. First, Copilot Workspace requires knowledge of how to read and understand code to use effectively. Second, throughout history, programming has become easier with the invention of new tools, yet the demand for programmers has never declined.

Seriously though, I hope by the time it’s ready to replace me I’ll have retired anyway. That may be too optimistic. But either way, I think I’ll be far more saddened over the fact that’s it’s made a hobby I love pointless. And, yeah, I could say screw it and just keep coding for the enjoyment of it but if it’s easier to describe the problem in 25 words and have an AI generate it then I won’t be motivated to.

There are some one-off tasks I fire up Powershell for because they are a pain in the arse to do without a dedicated tool and can’t as easily be done in “one” line in a terminal with other languages.

This is an example:

Get-Content .\deliveries.csv | ConvertFrom-Csv | ConvertTo-Json | Out-File .\deliveries.json

I find PowerShell ugly to work with for larger scripts (probably no more so than bash), but as a general purpose command line tool it’s brilliant sometimes.

Kilemall

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

There are some one-off tasks I fire up Powershell for because they are a pain in the arse to do without a dedicated tool and can’t as easily be done in “one” line in a terminal with other languages.

This is an example:
Get-Content .\deliveries.csv | ConvertFrom-Csv | ConvertTo-Json | Out-File .\deliveries.json
I find PowerShell ugly to work with for larger scripts (probably no more so than bash), but as a general purpose command line tool it’s brilliant sometimes.

I just implemented a powershell command because our usual utility software has a limit we didn’t know about. It’s stupider then the usual utility but good enough and likely backwards compatible enough to stay working past my retirement.