The OFFICIAL programming thread

[A Former User]

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

[A Former User]

@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

[A Former User]

@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.

[A Former User]

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.

[Gators1]

I inherited a team after a reorg and with that a report that has years of powershell scripts upon scripts added to it to pull data and make charts. It was apparently originally converted from VBA. We have to produce this weekly and it takes one of my people maybe half a week of running scripts and waiting to get it done. Obviously we are going to automate, but trying to dig down into what each thing does and how it gets data is going to be a research project. There are many such kludged together bandaid scripts like that in my company.

[A Former User]

The problem with my job is that the pace of new shit arriving keeps getting faster and faster and the old shit never really goes away. In any given week, I’m supporting applications written in tech that had its origins in the 1980’s through to the 2020’s. That’s 40 years of technical fads, missteps and obsolete crap that somehow I’ve got to keep in my head. I was in a Teams call with another programmer yesterday debugging some weird problem in a language I’ve got decades of experience in but haven’t used much recently and I had to apologize because I’d forgotten how to write some simple statement or other. At night I’m learning the next thing that’s being adopted to increase my chances of being employed in a few months.

[Gators1]

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

The problem with my job is that the pace of new shit arriving keeps getting faster and faster and the old shit never really goes away. In any given week, I’m supporting applications written in tech that had its origins in the 1980’s through to the 2020’s. That’s 40 years of technical fads, missteps and obsolete crap that somehow I’ve got to keep in my head. I was in a Teams call with another programmer yesterday debugging some weird problem in a language I’ve got decades of experience in but haven’t used much recently and I had to apologize because I’d forgotten how to write some simple statement or other. At night I’m learning the next thing that’s being adopted to increase my chances of being employed in a few months.

I feel you. We don’t have different languages, but rely on a lot of libraries with vastly different syntaxes and tooling that’s wildly different. I don’t even bother trying to “learn” it anymore, I just refer to the docs, GPT or copy/paste from stack overflow for about half of what I do. Only the stuff specific to our data I have to hand write and that’s mostly SEEEEEEQUEL. If I have to use Python I get confused because the main Python data libraries Pandas, Dask, Pyspark, Polars and Snowpark all do things differently. A few aren’t that different but then throw in some random syntax change that has me screaming F bombs for an hour or so. Also we have no devops so we have to manage all the infra and learn on the fly how to configure that shit.

Also today in our staff meeting my boss started talking about AI and how he wants to stand up shit because customer service is doing a project using AWS help. I am like we have no AI talent on the teams and we have been working a year and a half on your clusterfuck project and have not delivered anything (said in my mind obviously). I did bring up the point and he is still talking about working it into the schedule even though his schedule is more ambitious than the moon landing. Guy is a total nob.

[Lob12]

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

The problem with my job is that the pace of new shit arriving keeps getting faster and faster and the old shit never really goes away. In any given week, I’m supporting applications written in tech that had its origins in the 1980’s through to the 2020’s. That’s 40 years of technical fads, missteps and obsolete crap that somehow I’ve got to keep in my head. I was in a Teams call with another programmer yesterday debugging some weird problem in a language I’ve got decades of experience in but haven’t used much recently and I had to apologize because I’d forgotten how to write some simple statement or other. At night I’m learning the next thing that’s being adopted to increase my chances of being employed in a few months.

Guy is a total nob.

nounINFORMAL•BRITISH
noun: nob; plural noun: nobs
a person of wealth or high social position.

Nice to see you think so well of your boss!

[Gators1]

@Lob12 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Gators1 said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

@Hog said in The OFFICIAL programming thread:

The problem with my job is that the pace of new shit arriving keeps getting faster and faster and the old shit never really goes away. In any given week, I’m supporting applications written in tech that had its origins in the 1980’s through to the 2020’s. That’s 40 years of technical fads, missteps and obsolete crap that somehow I’ve got to keep in my head. I was in a Teams call with another programmer yesterday debugging some weird problem in a language I’ve got decades of experience in but haven’t used much recently and I had to apologize because I’d forgotten how to write some simple statement or other. At night I’m learning the next thing that’s being adopted to increase my chances of being employed in a few months.

Guy is a total nob.

nounINFORMAL•BRITISH
noun: nob; plural noun: nobs
a person of wealth or high social position.

Nice to see you think so well of your boss!

I was thinking of a different meaning. I guess I should just stick to Finnish insults though since I understand them better than UK ones.

[A Former User]

Calling someone a nob has always been an insult in parts where i’ve lived.

[Lob12]

I thought the insult was spelled “knob”

“VULGAR SLANG•BRITISH
View definition
a stupid or contemptible man.”

[A Former User]

@Lob12 yeah you’re right.

I’m awarding this match to you and rescinding Gators’ earlier points.