The Whiteboard

1:14 AM

The more I poke at clojure the more I am inclined there's something to it simply because my immediate perturbance by it reminds me of my initial reaction to haskell as weird and pointless

Steffen Winkler

7:27 AM

hi, since I'm not a regular user of programmers.stackexchange...could someone look over my question and tell me if programmers is the correct place to ask it or should I move over to stackoverflow? programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/195928/…

Yannis Rizos

@SteffenWinkler Looks good for Programmers.

Steffen Winkler

@YannisRizos thanks :)

Yannis Rizos

@SteffenWinkler If by any chance it gets closed, you should post a question on our Meta site and ask how it can be improved and re-opened. I'm not intimately familiar with the C# ecosystem, so I can't be 100% certain about the reception it'll get from our C# crowd. I can't see why it would be closed, but I may be missing something.

Steffen Winkler

ok, thanks for the link. Will see what'll happen ;).

@YannisRizos since I never had someone edit my question before: Is there a way to see the diff? I'd like to know what you changed ;)

Yannis Rizos

7:45 AM

@SteffenWinkler Yes, if you click the timestamp link you'll get a full revision history for any post (that has been edited at least once), not only your own.

"edited 13 mins ago" The link under "13 mins ago" is the timestamp link.

Steffen Winkler

ahh, thanks

and thanks for fixing those...interesting, always thought 'each other' was one word.

Yannis Rizos

Heh, I thought so as well until someone fixed it on one of my posts here.

Steffen Winkler

7:59 AM

reads your post oh...so 'as well' is not written as one word, too? TIL

Yannis Rizos

"aswell" is one of the examples of very common errors in Common Errors in English Usage

Steffen Winkler

I should probably buy that book... ;)

Yannis Rizos

It's a good book. That said, if you aren't certain of which form of a word or phrase is the correct one, our sister sites English Language & Usage and English Language Learners can be very helpful. Grammar Girl is a very helpful resource as well.

Also, keep checking revisions to see what people edit, I became a lot more confident with English after I started using Stack Exchange. Edits are generally encouraged, and I've picked up a lot of things I had no idea about just by looking at others' edits.

iCanLearn

11:03 AM

This may be a stupid question, but... Can you (in today's world) be a business developer without touching the web? Of course, there might be a few jobs like that, but does it make sense as a specialization?

thorsten müller

11:15 AM

@iCanLearn sure, there are still many products not directly related to any web interface at all. Many inhouse solutions in sales, insurance, erp, science or banking are just plain old GUI. Though of course a lot of consumer software that until lately was GUI only is now made available for web or mobile devices or in some kind of cloud service.

iCanLearn

11:33 AM

Ok, thanks... I guess that what's confusing me is the fact that 95% of job ads require web development knowledge (or even concentrate on that), but then when I look at salary statistics, web developers seem to be lower paid than "regular" developers, and a lot of people seem to think that web development is somehow easier...

user41796

@SteffenWinkler - that's a good question on your part, thanks for asking it. I hope you pick up a couple of ideas for additional reading from my answer.

user41796

@iCanLearn - web development is but one slice of the development world. Embedded device developers may never, ever have to worry about web aspects (unless they embed a web server in their device of course). Other applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, payroll systems don't require web skills either.

iCanLearn

@GlenH7: I know, in theory. Maybe things are different in the US and other countries, but over here (in Croatia), if you look through the job ads, almost everything is web development. :/ I'm looking through the ads right now, there's like 20 positions which require web knowledge and one that doesn't BUT you need to have experience with SAP for that one.

...and then there's this: codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/…

Steffen Winkler

11:48 AM

@GlenH7 hah, commented on your answer. Security came only into play since making everything 'public' is not the cleverest idea, I guess.

thorsten müller

@iCanLearn web development is the big boom right now (or was the last years) together with mobile development. Especially it's work done locally very often and a better entry point for small companies. In the "big business" you already have many large companies established for many years (like SAP, Microsoft etc). Large companies that contract externals often expect a lot of reputation.)

And many companies do business worldwide now and want their software be accessible from many places. So even if you ignore the browser part, at least some server/cloud part becomes relevant in many places (even embedded devices as GlenH7 mentions start to connect to the internet and I think I have seen the first fridge prototype that's 'connected')

iCanLearn

12:01 PM

I see. :/ Thanks for the answer.

user41796

1:24 PM

@iCanLearn - another thing to consider is to take Atwood's comments with a grain of salt (or three). Jeff has had some remarkably brilliant insights, but he's also had some exceptionally mediocre ones. Also keep in mind his locale (West Coast US, Southern California I believe) which is obviously NOT Croatia. To borrow a cliche, all job markets are local. And that's where professional networks really come into play. ...

user41796

... Start meeting other developers in your area and get a better understanding of which companies are doing what types of development. User groups, professional associations, local tech conferences (or the equivalent) are good ways to identify peers to network with. Another approach is an informal request to the organization saying "Hey, I develop and I'm interested in your firm. I don't think my current skills match what you need though. What technologies do you use and need? ...

user41796

... I'll study them and come back to you once I've gotten an understanding of those technologies and can contribute to you."

Steffen Winkler

@iCanLearn hmm here in Germany most jobs are either C# or Java related currently.

user55340

1:42 PM

@iCanLearn Web development includes the kid who dropped out of college and is writing awful php for a mom and pop shop as well as google coders. There are a lot of the first that tend to bring down the average... which is then unfortunately used by other companies as a "but this is the average." So while its lower than some other paths, it isn't necessarily as low as the average would indicate.

user55340

@psr Hows this for a nice simple gravatar...

user55340

Paul

159 3

.net agile c# extreme-programming gui-design logic-programming memory

iCanLearn

2:24 PM

@GlenH7: I actually had the idea of doing that (informal request) thing already, nice to hear it's not a crazy idea. @Steffen: Hmm, it's my impression that the situation over here is similar, but C# related jobs are 95% ASP.NET jobs and the Java related ones are also mostly web based. @MichaelT: Yeah, I guess you're right!

Jimmy Hoffa

2:47 PM

@MichaelT now I'm interested in someone who busted the gravatar algorithm and just has a blank white gravatar

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I'd settle with solid color.

Jimmy Hoffa

3:30 PM

Also acceptable

gravatar.com/avatar/…

@RobertHarvey ping - You worked with WebForms for years, no?

Robert Harvey

3:54 PM

@JimmyHoffa Reluctantly. I'm probably better at MVC.

user41796

4:11 PM

StackExchange protocol question - I found (and answered) a question that has a nearly exact duplicate in P.SE. However, I really disagree with top rated answer of the older question. Should I still vote to close the new question as duplicate of the older one or not?

user41796

0

Q: Moving forward in the programming world

I have been placed in a recent position where my job title does not adequately represent what my current duties entail. I am worried that this classification will affect me later in my career as the job title does not specify 'programmer'. How important is the job title while maintaining a caree...

interview work-environment job-title

user41796

^^^ is the question; link to duplicate is embedded in that Q as a comment from me.

user55340

15

Q: How important is my job title?

I work on two internal, mission critical applications. Let's keep it simple and call them "Foo" and "Bar". Nobody outside of the company has ever heard of them - like I said, they're internal apps. Until now my jobtitle has just been "Software Developer". I've recently discovered that my jobt...

resume job-title

user55340

If that was asked today, it would likely be migrated to workplace...

user55340

I once had the job title "Member of technical staff"

Jimmy Hoffa

4:14 PM

@RobertHarvey everyone moved to MVC from webforms because everyone is better at MVC; it just works better. I've been in webforms for years and am stuck fiddling up a bit of webforms again; was thinking there's probably some free custom controls out there that are better than the classic gridview garbage, have you any familiarity with free custom WebForms controls? I'm coming up empty handed except for JuiceUI which is just jquery controls in WebForm format

user55340

Caused some slight tension - I was an entry level contractor at the time, and all contractors had the same title. SGI (where I was contracting) had "technical staff" mean "the title we give to those developers who dream up new things" - the cream of R&D.

user41796

@MichaelT that would be an awesome title. I'd actually keep business cards from that one simply for the "awe" aspect.

user41796

My only claim to an eyebrow raising title is when I was brought in at a title & level that previously required a professional engineer license. I found out after the fact that it rankled quite a few of the older rank-and-file.

Robert Harvey

@JimmyHoffa A jQuery control retrofitted for Webforms doesn't sound like the worst way to go.

Jimmy Hoffa

4:49 PM

@RobertHarvey yeah, unfortunately there are none. I would gladly work in a lively grip of javascript alone from WebForms but I'm the only member of my team who knows JavaScript so they want it to stay pure WebForms as much as I can. The JuiceUI has all the standard jquery UI controls; unfortunately none of the jquery UI controls are a grid; there is a company that made a commercial jqGrid implementation in WebForms controls but we're not going to pay for that (this use case isn't important)

I've decided to use a minimum of javascript, using a gridview which is just a table and jqGrid has a "tableToGrid()" function which will pleasantly clean up the grid and add paging/sorting/filtering on client side so I dont' need to hand-roll the serverside gridview code for that.

psr

5:25 PM

Before MVC my solution was "never use any ASP.NET controls ever and it won't be too bad". It was true, but did NOT go over well in job interviews.

Jimmy Hoffa

6:06 PM

@psr yeah, that would be my preference but again; that requires knowledge of javascript which no one on my team knows nor wants to (we're a back-end team, this is just a management console)

user55340

6:22 PM

Won't this confuse those who read my code that it is actually called by other methods, when in fact it's only called by one? — exizt 1 hour ago

user55340

@exizt No it will not. — MichaelT 1 hour ago

user55340

The minimum length comment thing forced me to add three more words.

Jimmy Hoffa

7:06 PM

@MichaelT whenever I'm troubled for minimum length I put something along the lines of FILTER_REQUIREMENT=AE321H2F8

or uniqueness or whatever else. Somebody will see it and know why it's there and think "Maybe that requirement is stupid"..

(wishful thinking)

user55340

28

Q: Bananas in comments?

On this question, I'm seeing bananas in two of the comments: Am I going bananas?

discussion comments

Jimmy Hoffa

How grand

user55340

7:25 PM

Lets see how this gets oneboxed...

user55340

8

A: Enforcing a question minimum character length?

psr

8:17 PM

Infinite monkey theorem

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces an endless random sequence of letters and symbols. The relevance of the theory is questionable—the probability of a monkey exactly typing a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that th...

It appears that someone tried the experiment with 6 Macaques. The typed 5 pages, mostly the letter S, then the lead monkey hit the typewriter with a stone and the other monkeys urinated and defecated on it.

Sounds more like a Family Guy episode to me.

user55340

@psr That explains a good deal of the code that I am looking at.

psr

@MichaelT Good point. Let's hope no HR department reads of this and decides to start hiring macaques.

user55340

@psr Adding more monkeys to the project will only make a late project later. This is easier to demonstrate with monkeys than it is with programmers.

Jimmy Hoffa

8:36 PM

@MichaelT I have a sincere feeling only a very few primitive forms of demonstration are in fact easier with monkeys than with programmers.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Ever read about the alien at the end Close Encounters?

Jimmy Hoffa

My wife used to be a primate keeper, the stories she tells; those things are scary.

@MichaelT No?

user55340

The sites are blocked for me at work... search google for "Close encounters roller skate orangutan" - it will give you an idea.

user55340

Short version - Speilberg wanted a long sinuous alien. Kind of like what he did at the end of AI. This was the 70s though, no computer graphics. So there was an idea to put an orangutang in a jump suit on roller skates. This was not a good idea.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I can find nothing about this online, did they actually try that?

user55340

8:44 PM

imdb.com/title/tt0075860/trivia

user55340

I think thats the right url, can't verify it here.

Jimmy Hoffa

That just says it was an idea, assuming they never tried it then

user55340

google "Close encounters of the third kind orangutan" - links to www.edgephiladelphia.com and randommovieclub.blogspot.com

user41796

@MichaelT - why, why, why did you have to link the question about bananas in comments. Didn't you know that it would cause me moments of frustration as I tried to get unicode characters entered into PSE comments?

Jimmy Hoffa

🍌

user55340

8:54 PM

Unfortunately, I'm on a rather limited font set world, so I just see a box.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT as do I, but it's not for me :)

user41796

same here; perhaps that's a sign I should give up and go back to the research I'm supposed to be doing instead...

user41796

awesome; two review tallies off of one question. :-)

user55340

9:36 PM

> My Last Theorem: A Prankster's Guide to Ageless Mathematical Jokes That are Funny Because They're True and People Can't Prove Them for Centuries." P. Fermat. Circa 1630.

user20683

@MichaelT P =NP xor P != NP?

user55340

@WorldEngineer True.

user20683

@MichaelT I knew you'd say that

user20683

I realized immediately after I typed it

user55340

In some lisp code that I wrote back in college, we had an assignment of "find the set of conditions to make this expression true"

user55340

9:39 PM

where "this expression" was a massive logical statement.

user55340

To speed it up somewhat, I wrote a function called "hamletp" that returned true when it was passed "(or foo (not foo))" and false when it was passed "(and foo (not foo))"

user55340

This way I could possibly collapse large parts of the tree rapidly. Well, that was the theory. And I had fun writing it.

user20683

@MichaelT some day I will get around to mastering Lisp

user20683

so that I can claim I use a "chainsaw made of chainsaws"

user20683

in reference to comments on Ruby's blocks and how they give you just enough of the lisp chainsaw

user55340

9:44 PM

That was many years ago. I also remember a model of readers and writers using cars, boats, and a draw bridge... I named the semaphore controlling the draw bridge "troll"

user55340

Greenspun's tenth rule

Greenspun's tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming and especially programming language circles that states: This expresses the opinion that the perceived flexibility and extensibility designed into the Lisp programming language includes all functionality that is theoretically necessary to write a complex computer program, and that the core implementations of other programming languages often do not supply critical functionality necessary to develop complex programs. Origin The rule was written sometime around 1993 by Philip Greenspun. Although it is known as ...

user55340

> Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

user41796

Clearly someone was having a hard day at work ... programmers.stackexchange.com/revisions/196022/1

user20683

dinwal, Atlanta, GA

6 2

algorithms

user20683

This guy is very soon to be Dr. Agarwal. He defended on the 18th

user20683

9:47 PM

so drink in his honor tonight if you would

user55340

drdinwal?

user20683

that is btw how out of it I've been, I only just found out.

user20683

@MichaelT dinwal is his handle

user41796

@WorldEngineer - I dunno, he's only got 6 rep. Are you sure he's qual'd to have PhD after his name? ;-)

user20683

@GlenH7 yes

user20683

9:48 PM

very very smart guy

user20683

also really humble about it

user41796

<--- very, very smart azz guy

user41796

and not so humble about it

user20683

@GlenH7 this is a well known fact

user20683

;P

user41796

9:49 PM

seriously, props to him. I don't really regret having left the PhD track, but I sometimes wonder about how things would be different if I had completed mine. Regardless, it's a crazy amount of work to complete one.

user55340

I never went post grad track... academia wasn't where I wanted to be.

user20683

yeah I'm the same, I won't get past Master's more than likely

user55340

I broke a cow-orker by sending him a link to SO...

user55340

1134

Q: What is your most productive shortcut with Vim?

I've heard a lot about Vim, both pros and cons. It really seems you should be (as a developer) faster with Vim than with any other editor. I'm using Vim to do some basic stuff and I'm at best 10 times less productive with Vim. The only two things you should care about when you talk about speed (...

vim productivity vi

user55340

About a month ago he went "crazy" vim usage... got tabs and multiple subscreens and whatnot...

user41796

9:52 PM

@MichaelT - I don't know if I should applaud or condemn such blatant trolling of a coworker. Or maybe I should do both.

user55340

His email back to me was thus:

user55340

Too much info!!!

Looks pretty interesting though.

user55340

Ahh, I should have done more downvoting today... just hit the rep cap.

user41796

@MichaelT - the crazy diamonds would have likely just giving the points back to you after they got done deleting things... :-) I've already received several points back today...

user55340

10:08 PM

+1 22 mins ago upvote

user55340

Though there are some things that can go outside the boundry of the rep cap... The +15 from accepted answers can push someone over the cap.

user20683

@MichaelT yeah I've gotten 215 a few times

user55340

There's a John Skeet post on MSO about the rep cap.

user55340

If you get the +15 before you hit the rep cap, it is part of the rep cap. If you get the +15 after the rep cap, you get it.

user41796

I didn't realize Jon Skeet was a rep whore just like the rest of us. My world feels so much better now.

user20683

10:15 PM

@GlenH7 Jon Skeet is a Rep Whore to the point of being a Rep Pimp

user41796

I'd pretend to be smug about that difference, but I think I realize the sordid truth.

user20683

@GlenH7 something like that

user55340

15

Q: What is the ideal time zone to live in for maximum reputation?

This is an offshoot of this question, where oxbow_lakes feels that casual users in the US have an advantage over casual users in the UK. I was wondering what sort of user would do best in what sort of time zone, assuming a "reasonably normal" daily schedule. When is it easiest to get upvotes? W...

discussion reputation daily-reputation-limit timezone

user55340

There was a game I played long ago where the "daily" update was on a 25h cycle rather than 24h so that it moved over time and no one had an advantage all the time of "logging in after the update"

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