The ASCII Collab Club

Conor O'Brien

00:00

saame

Hosch250

Yeah, most golfers aren't on Windows.

Conor O'Brien

I am :P I should be writing a paper that was due yesterday

Hosch250

Uh, whoa. I'm not that bad.

Conor O'Brien

yeah. fortunately it was extended

I should probably do that now. peace

Hosch250

Have fun.

Destructible Watermelon

00:01

The ascii art thing I made was a poor physics simulator, but it takes input every tick

PhiNotPi

@Hosch250 hi

Hosch250

Hi.

PhiNotPi

A windows lichess app sounds cool.

Hosch250

Yeah. I'm not betting on it being completed.

I graduate next May, so...

Boy, it doesn't seem that long ago that we did the other games.

PhiNotPi

Like, 2 years ago actually.

Hosch250

00:13

The first summer when I was in college?

How is college going for you?

PhiNotPi

I'm a sophomore now.. I think the original projects occurred while I was in high school.

It's going well so far. Majoring in biomedical engineering.

Hosch250

Yeah, you told me when you applied.

That's why you didn't do much for the chess game.

PhiNotPi

> On the other hand, October is a busy month in school for me. Would November be OK, or maybe Christmas break (or both, as we are available)?

Hosch250

Yes?

PhiNotPi

I'm available both times.

Hosch250

00:17

OK. I picked all the other projects, so you guys can pick it this time.

I may or may not join, depending on the project or language, but have fun either way :)

PhiNotPi

Any time really, with a little bit of planning.

Also, the cost seems decent due to some scholarships.

Hosch250

The biggest problems with programming for me are A) I don't know when to stop, and B) I've got a speech class, and I'm got very good at speaking.

@PhiNotPi Same here. I got a $20k scholarship that covers half the tuition based on my ACT score.

PhiNotPi

Similar, but for my PSAT score.

Hosch250

Awesome.

Books are something else, though, aren't they?

Especially since my family has many allergies, so we have to buy new books. Cats, perfumes, whatever...

PhiNotPi

I am personally of the opinion that these tests are a rather poor way to give out scholarship money, but hey, it works for me.

Hosch250

00:22

Eh well, I think race/gender is a rather worse way to choose. That's how about 90% of the third-party scholarships available through my U are limited.

I don't mind need-based scholarships, though. There probably aren't enough of those.

PhiNotPi

I've added a computer science minor.

I mean, that shouldn't surprise anybody who knows me

Hosch250

I added a Communications minor.

I'm told that I'm a really strong writer, and I like writing.

I'm a weak speaker from mostly lack of practice, and also because I have a hard time thinking on my feet.

PhiNotPi

I had a really fun speech/rhetoric class last year. Literally all we did was write speeches and give them.

I wrote some of the funniest things I've ever written for that class.

Hosch250

I have a hard time exposing the real me to people.

PhiNotPi

What format is the class/ what topics are you allowed to use?

Hosch250

00:37

Business speaking.

Presentations.

So, what brought this old room to life again?

PhiNotPi

I decided to revive it. That's all.

I'm like a chat necromancer.

What other programming projects have you done recently?

Hosch250

I did an "internship" with Rubberduck VBA this summer.

Have I told you about my involvement with that?

PhiNotPi

no

Hosch250

Oh, I thought I had a while back.

PhiNotPi

maybe you did

Hosch250

00:47

It is an addin written in C# for the VBE.

If you have Office on Windows, you can bring the VBE up with ALT-F11.

You can basically programatically control a lot of the Office programs through that, and even use it for some pretty crazy things, like writing FizzBuzz in Excel.

I've seen a program that plays 2048 in Excel.

Only, the VBE was last touched around 2001, or something, so it isn't really a good IDE.

PhiNotPi

Some of my friends do VBA programming. I've barely touched it.

Hosch250

Rubberduck adds IDE features, like a Code Explorer to replace the Project Explorer, refactorings (I wrote most of those), integrated Source Control, unit tests, and all sorts of stuff.

I've had my finger in every feature, I think, now, and there are a lot.

Qwerp-Derp

Does anyone have any experience with command blocks here?

PhiNotPi

codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/rubberduck

71 questions tagged rubberduck... I guess it's a pretty big community project

@Qwerp-Derp minecraft?

Qwerp-Derp

Yeah

PhiNotPi

00:54

no, not really

Qwerp-Derp

Ah crap

I'm trying to make Mafia in Minecraft

Which detects text from people

Hosch250

We have a website too, that I rewrote sections of during my internship.

In the new, unreleased version, you can enter code from a single module and run the inspections on it.

It will display the results in a neat table.

PhiNotPi

Also, why'd you put quotes around "internship" earlier?

Hosch250

Oh, because it didn't really feel like an internship.

I basically just kept contributing to an open source project I was already familiar with.

I did learn a lot, though.

PhiNotPi

@Hosch250 how much have you heard about Quest for Tetris?

Hosch250

01:02

None at all.

PhiNotPi

It has probably been the largest programming project I've worked on... like ever.

The challenge: build a working game of tetris in Conway's game of life.

Hosch250

Uh, interesting.

Rubberduck has over 2k downloads, so it is easily the largest I've ever worked on.

PhiNotPi

I'm not currently working on QFT (simply because we've hit a difficulty wall, being that processor design is hard).

But we have wires, logic gates, circuits, adders, memory, etc. working.

We also planned out our processor architecture, created our own assembly language, and wrote compilers.

Hosch250

Oh, I think you've told me a little bit about this.

Was this what you were working on back when you were creating your processor?

PhiNotPi

It was intense, and the results have been absolutely beautiful.

@Hosch250 how long ago? I've done similar things multiple times.

Hosch250

01:07

Back during the ASCII art things, I think.

PhiNotPi

no, that was something else, probably done in Logisim

Hosch250

OK.

PhiNotPi

This happened over summer.

github.com/PhiNotPi/Cogol

Hosch250

Interesting.

Oh, talking about compilers...

I've been contributing to the Roslyn repo.

Roslyn is the C#/VB.NET compiler.

I've not contributed to the actual compiler; I've just been writing diagnostics for Visual Studio.

A lot of Visual Studio code is in the same repo.

PhiNotPi

I just made the mistake of typing VB.NET into my browser bar.

Hosch250

01:17

What happened?

It stands for Visual Basic.

The .NET version of Visual Basic.

PhiNotPi

It took me to the website vb.net

Hosch250

Is there one?

What does it look like?

PhiNotPi

It's some poorly-designed computer hardware shop website, primarily in some language I don't understand.

Hosch250

Oh.

Anonymous

@PhiNotPi Looks German

PhiNotPi

01:24

@Mego Dutch

Anonymous

Close enough

PhiNotPi

I've never really been a fan of Visual Basic/C#.

Hosch250

I like C#.

F# is cool too, but I just started learning it.

I hate everything VB.

Anonymous

VB is yucky but it's super easy to make GUIs in

Anonymous

Make the GUI using the VB designer, and write C# code as the controller :P

PhiNotPi

01:27

Also... I think it's interesting how much my university's business school uses VBA.

Anonymous

Eww

Hosch250

So is C#.

C# has the same WinForms designer.

Same WPF designer too, and WPF is nicer.

Of course, the designer results in icky XAML in WPF, so you have to write a lot of that by hand if you want to maintain it.

@PhiNotPi VBA is used a lot in businesses.

That's how Rubberduck got started. Two business people were sick of the VBE.

One left to work in C#, and last I heard, was doing embedded programming.

The other is still there, and there are a few on/off contributors.

Anonymous

I've never used the designer on the C# side - only VB at my last job

Hosch250

We got one person that really knows COM, and me besides (well, I haven't done anything since my internship ended).

PhiNotPi

I've had several of my friends ask "how do I ___ in VBA" and I'm like "why on Earth would you use VBA?"

Speaking of terrible software, there's a program called "Lab Course" that I use in my biomed lab, and it's the worst piece of software I've ever been forced to use.

Anonymous

01:36

@PhiNotPi Is it made by Pearson?

PhiNotPi

@Mego "Great Lakes NeuroTechnologies"

Anonymous

@PhiNotPi Even worse

Hosch250

Pearson is pretty good, usually.

Cengage isn't the hottest.

PhiNotPi

What it does is basically do bluetooth pairing with a device called a "BioRadio" (nothing bio about it, basically a glorified multimeter).

Hosch250

Pearson and McGraw-Hill are the best publishers.

PhiNotPi

01:40

And it has a bunch of built-in learning exercises about signal processing and stuff. The problem is that it's exceedingly bad at saving files.

Anonymous

Textbook publishers are inherently evil. They release new "versions" annually that aren't any different and strong-arm professors into forcing their students to buy them for the course.

PhiNotPi

in The Nineteenth Byte, Oct 4 at 1:56, by PhiNotPi

Ever feel like textbook publishers just make new versions for no reason? Well this C++ book is very explicit about it: "The fifth edition presents the same programming philosophy as the fourth edition. For instructors, you can teach the same course, presenting the same topics in the same order with no changes in the material covered or chapters assigned."

Anonymous

The only difference is a new code for the online resources that at best you never use and at worst you use constantly but it thinks "6.50" != "6.50" for whatever insane clown logic reason

Anonymous

/rant

PhiNotPi

The main thing regarding this software is that, at the very beginning when you open it up, it asks you what directory name you want to save your files under. If there's any problem at all... it lets you proceed with all of your work and silently errors whenever you try to save any file.

Anonymous

01:44

Gah

Anonymous

Silent errors are the worst

Anonymous

(disregard that I wrote a programming language that silently errors all the time)

PhiNotPi

@Hosch250 how complete was the chess game?

Hosch250

02:15

@PhiNotPi Not very complete, really.

I don't remember. I think it had a sort of basic AI, but it was easily beatable. Also, it was very buggy.

I think part of the reason the AI was so beatable because I had to set the value down so low.

PhiNotPi

oh yeah I remember... lookahead sucked

Hosch250

02:39

@PhiNotPi What's this? chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/45988/casual-chat-chess

PhiNotPi

22:38

@Hosch250 I am interested in helping with the lichess app, btw. You asked if anyone wanted to help.

Hosch250

Oh sure.

I was planning on doing the logic in F# to help learn that, and the UI in C# because UI's work better when you can have state.

I literally just got on again.

PhiNotPi

I assume you probably haven't even started it yet.

Hosch250

Nope. Hopefully next month.

PhiNotPi

@Hosch250 Great timing

Transcript for

The ASCII Collab Club