The Whiteboard - 2012-11-17

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12:00 AM

Is that all? I thought it was longer than that. Not bad at all.

user20683

12:49 AM

@YannisRizos @ThomasOwens any idea on the history behind that "Don't call yourself a programmer" part of the FAQ?

@WorldEngineer How it got in the FAQ you mean?

user20683

@YannisRizos yeah

user20683

it's fairly recent

@WorldEngineer October 2011 is when it was added.

So it's been in the FAQ for over a year.

It got in a day after the article was published. The mods back then thought it would be a good idea, given the huge amount of career related questions Programmers was getting. If there's no strong opposition to removing it from the FAQ, we will shortly. I'd remove it tomorrow, but it's the weekend, so... Monday perhaps.

user20683

12:53 AM

@YannisRizos @ThomasOwens yeah, I'm in agreement with that. It makes us look rather unprofessional beyond the other issues with it

I haven't read it, so I really don't know what the fuss is about. I probably won't read it, cause... I don't care ;) If the community decides it should go, which seems more than likely, well, it will go.

I don't remember the last time I've seen something with such overwhelming support on Meta...

True, but I don't want to change the FAQ based on a Meta question that hasn't been out there for even a day.

But I seriously doubt there will be a single downvote on the question or its answers on Monday.

Yeah. That would be rather rash. Someone might have a valid reason to keep it. Changing the same section in the FAQ every time we turn around isn't a good idea.

user20683

blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/16/…

user20683

12:58 AM

..,whoops

1:58 AM

Man, why did I have to be driving home when this one was posted...

1

Q: How would you react if someone told you your code is a mess?

I am a good programmer, or so I thought before. I always love to program. And I want to learn many things about programming to make me a better programmer. I studied programming for 1 year and now I am working as a programmer for almost 2 years. So in short, I have almost 3 years programming expe...

And why are there 9 answers and only my upvote of the question? I love these personal-hurdles questions like that that every developer deals with every day, stuff that you can't learn in a class room but is intrical to the culture of our profession

I love spreading the everybodys-a-bad-programmer meme. Goes back to the safe to fail feeling every developer needs to actually think about their problems withuot hesitation

user20683

I figure if I code enough Haskell, then no one will understand the terrible code anyway

haha

sadly with Haskell the stuff i write when I ask haskellers to look at it they all tell me I'm clearly going about things wrong, and then give me critiques that don't even make any sense... it's like being 14 again when I would ask in #Cpp why some snippet was getting a seg fault and had no idea what the responses meant

It's like learning programming all over again, and it really kind of sucks.. heh

seriously how can 9 people answer a question and not one of them think it's worthy of an up vote

...I wonder if that guy is trolling

user20683

2:18 AM

@JimmyHoffa no idea

2:28 AM

Disappointed? Why the hell would you be disappointed? My former CTO called me out in an article he wrote (he didn't name me specifically, but everyone in our team knew who he was talking about), and the first change I got I quoted the article in one of my answers here. Also, I'm the evil developer described in this question. I encouraged the OP to post the question, and I even answered it ;) — Yannis Rizos 2 mins ago

I'm particularly proud of my screw ups ;)

Gotta be, tip-toeing around mistakes in this industry will make you too mentally hesitant and risk-averse to even try solving any of the difficult problems

End up one of those devs we all have to work with who won't write half a line of code without asking another engineer 4 questions about how to do it

user20683

@JimmyHoffa to quote Admiral Thrawn: "An error only becomes a mistake if you refuse to correct it"

Thrawn... oh yeah I knew him, good guy. Weird hair, but good guy. No, I have no idea what you're talking about. Sounds like the corporate world is making lots of mistakes by that definition though

@JimmyHoffa Not a Star Wars geek, eh?

user20683

starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mitth'raw'nuruodo

2:36 AM

Nah, the new Dr. Who is the nerdiest it gets for me. I was too busy gaming to find myself watching much TV.

@WorldEngineer btw the quote is from this guy:

Orlando Aloysius Battista

Orlando Aloysius Battista (June 20, 1917 - October 3, 1995), also frequently referred to as O.A. Battista, was a Canadian-American chemist and author. A devout Catholic, he was notable in his writing for not shying away from advertising his religious beliefs as well as his scientific ones. Biography Battista was born in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada, as the seventh of eight children. His father was a long-time Canadian government employee. As a child, he was an altar boy and earned money via shoveling snow and a newspaper route. He began writing at the age of twelve, after saving enough mo...

heh...cornwall...I did see enough beavis and butthead though...

user20683

@YannisRizos learn something new every day

@WorldEngineer is that a threat!?

he's a mod you fool!

"An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." is the actual quote.

2:38 AM

@YannisRizos does full-time PHP for someone who knows better never get under your skin; do you ever feel like you're using the classic double-clawed hammer or does that only play out more in the fact that PHP is so often the starting ground for new devs who don't know any better?

that is to say, every language can have api's like double-clawed hammers with sufficiently green devs, I guess I'm wondering if PHP is as bad as everyone says. My only run in with PHP was fiddling many years ago

PHP is awesome! I can hack a site from scratch in a couple of days ;P It's a huge relief from when I was writing corporate Java (the flavour of Java where, for example, you must write a strategy pattern for every switch statement with more than three conditions).

haha

blech, yeah corporate java is unpleasant I would imagine

user20683

@JimmyHoffa the two opinions I tend to run into are "Rough but can do whatever" and "How does anyone work with this?"

PHP has two main problems: Tons and tons of bad documentation and an unhealthy obsession for not breaking backwards compatibility. Both are ecosystem problems, the language isn't beautiful by any measurement, but it isn't half bad.

I figured it's bigger problem was how green the majority of PHP devs are

user20683

2:44 AM

@JimmyHoffa there are a lot of green Python and Ruby devs too

that's true

user20683

and Java but Java has other...issues

Also some flagship projects have seriously screwed up codebases. I've been working with Wordpress since its very early days and I still have no idea why it works.

haha

It just seems; though this is my perception, but PHP seems like the first immediate choice new developers who want to do web go to, especially if they never did any research to find out about ruby or python they're most likely aware of PHP

That used to be a very serious issue in the PHP community. The first project that was considered a flagship project was PHPNuke. It was everywhere, similarly to Wordpress today. But it was so badly coded that the PHP Group added a clause to the PHP Licence that projects are not allowed to use PHP in their names.

People thought PHPNuke was an official project, and it seriously hurt the perception for the language and the ecosystem in general.

2:47 AM

haha yeah phpnuke was everywhere indeed, that was the only php I touched because somebody I knew had it and couldn't figure out how it worked

The latest additions to the language are awesome though. I was always a multiple inheritance guy, and I love that PHP has traits.

PHP is fully dynamically typed right?

Yes

are objects closed at definition?

Hm? You lost me there.

2:51 AM

Can you add properties to an object at runtime?

after instantiation

user20683

@JimmyHoffa PHP runs everywhere

user20683

not necessarily true of Ruby or Python

@JimmyHoffa Technically yes, but it's more of an ugly hack.

Err? What don't ruby/python run?

user20683

@JimmyHoffa PHP comes with a good many server installs

2:54 AM

@YannisRizos ah, so it's not clean like in javascript

user20683

Ruby and Python less so

No, not really.

@WorldEngineer like?

PHP's object model is generally modelled upon Java's. That was a good thing for a while, as most PHP devs were familiar with Java, but it's not anymore. Newer additions though are a bit less restrained.

user20683

the Apache server

2:55 AM

@YannisRizos ah, was thinking in a fully dynamic language with open objects like javascript multiple inheritance wouldn't get you much when you could compsitionally apply the functionality and avoid some of the constructor confusion

@WorldEngineer you can't run Ruby or Python in apache??

user20683

@JimmyHoffa you can but it's not installed out of the box

ah, well that's just because PHP seduced apache first heh

though I might be crazy but I don't feel apache is altogether particularly important these days

@JimmyHoffa There are natively supported ways to overload both methods and properties, but they are a bit awkward and typically very slow. Traits on the other hand are explicit, coherent and lightning fast.

granted it's The Way for php, but in general I don't suspect that apache has any magic in a bottle claims left with the proliferation of successful competing web servers (rails, django, and everything else)

@JimmyHoffa news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey

2:59 AM

@YannisRizos Gotcha, that's interesting that it's a dynamic language but it has some strong-typing efficiency heuristics built in based on what little it does know about a type

user20683

I think I may write another blog post talking about not programming for programmings sake

The thing to remember about PHP is that it wasn't and still isn't designed. It evolves. Kinda tries to mix and match, borrowing from here and there. The results of this process range from awesome to absolutely horrific.

user20683

it's very much Perl gone mad

Sadly I feel there's such a stigma about MS that even engineers who should be objective are bitten and tend to fall on one side of the fence or other and often aren't willing to try the other side. Given that while MS's HTTP server numbers are rising there, I would bet most of apaches decline is caused by the various other *nix HTTP servers far more than MS

@WorldEngineer why not program for programmings sake? You get angry at project euler? heh

user20683

@JimmyHoffa not what I mean

user20683

3:05 AM

people will say things like "Need project ideas"

@WorldEngineer but I think Leonhard Euler is a very nice fellow :(

user20683

@JimmyHoffa I've no issue with project euler, difficulty aside

user20683

@JimmyHoffa I'd attribute it largely to Ruby on Rails, Groovy on Grails, Python's various things, and Node.js

user20683

PHP used to be all there was

user20683

this is not the case anymore

3:06 AM

Aye, that's what I'm saying as well

though truth be told I've been writing CRUD websites on the MS stack since '98 (it was horrible back then like whoa)

so it really never was "all there was"

And that's a good thing, the PHP community has been lazy for far too long. The last three updates to the language are awesome, and I imagine is a healthy reaction to competition.

How's PHP coming with functional features? Generators? Anonymous methods?

Closures

@WorldEngineer perl is perl gone mad

@YannisRizos No generators? I guess generics are unnecessary with the dynamic typing

Generators were added in a very recent iteration of the language (5.5), that's still alpha.

3:11 AM

actually generics could still be useful, in case it needed to construct a type

Released... yesterday ;)

Generics were?

No not generics, generators.

gotcha

afaik there's no plan for generics (yet?)

3:15 AM

huh, simple yield keyword, and tada. neat. Though I can understand why generators come later in a languages lifetime, they rely on coroutines which have got to be a bitch to implement

also about Apache. PHP now comes with a build in web server. It's not supposed to be used to support a production site, but it's good enough for testing. You don't have to deploy apache locally anymore.

Generics in a dynamic language are a pretty fringe use so it wouldn't be particularly worth while

only use they really have in a dynamic language would be like MethodTakesType<SomeType>() where SomeType { int specialNumber = GetSpecialNumber(); return new SomeType(specialNumber); }

which is way contrived and doesn't make any sense

user20683

@JimmyHoffa having used Haskell to some degree, I kind of feel like Type Inference is a better solution

I completely agree, but type inference in a classical OO language is NP-hard which is why you hear of "hindley-milner type inference" in all the languages with Algebraic Data Types

That's why OO languages have generics in general, thorough type inference is beyond what the compiler could do in reasonable time

I remember reading Jon Skeet or maybe one of the .NET guys detail how they had to make that trade off when they wrote the current type inference in .NET that it only goes a determinable number of layers before just giving up and throwing an error which wouldn't necessarily mean the type doesn't check, just that the compiler won't make the effort to do it.

but type inference is unnecessary in a dynamic language anyway unless they wanted another heuristic to improve performance by using type information that they are aware of, which apparently PHP has done to some extent in other places so maybe it would be worth it's time...

3:40 AM

@YannisRizos ...saving whole HTML blocks in the session array... yeah you deserved to get called out on that haha ;D wanders off to pretend like he didn't once load into memory on a desktop app a full directory listing

@JimmyHoffa What Andreas fails to mention there is that the requirements changed radically thrice in the same week, and we couldn't miss the deadline. Also he personally reviewed my code, and he was fine with it at the time. ;} But yeah, we always wanted to fix that thing eventually, and at some point we just forgot about it, until of course something broke.

yeah, almost wonder if build systems should have a "shit you forgot about" list separate from the warnings everyone ignores anyways

Also one of the core functions of the project, that coordinates instantiation of most core libraries, is named voodoo() and it's about 800 loc long.

haha at least you're not calling it a field of roses

...and not a single one of these lines is a comment.

3:47 AM

I absolutely cannot for the life of me stand large methods... they make me want to stab javelins into my legs and try pole vaulting with them

but worse than big methods like that are when people try to sell you on "it's really not bad"

least you call it voodoo and know it's probably going to stick a needle in your eye some day

I can't stand them either. But on the other hand I also can't stand working during the weekend because someone gave the client a completely unrealistic deadline, or failed to communicate the requirements properly. It was a concious decision to put everything in there and ignore anything that resembled a good practice.

there's some amazingly written code in that project, but its bad parts are truly awful.

haha yeah I hear ya. I've only done that a few times; I've usually done the "Well, sounds like you fucked up when you promised that to the client, see ya monday" approach, but you can only pull that off if the companies the kind that won't can you for it heh

I can't pull that off, because... part of the company is mine. If I was an employee, I'd probably quit.

haha

Yeah, that doesn't really fly when it's yours

It's not that bad, we just had a few very stressful months last year, and we completely abandon our processes in favour of quick and dirty hacking.

...and of course now it's time to pay the technical debt.

3:54 AM

That's not too bad, corporate shops regularly collect technical debt for years on end before ever realizing something's wrong

It occurs to me, you probably don't recognize my name do you?

user20683

@JimmyHoffa I do

user20683

:P

I do. Thought you were dead? :P

Always odd to me how much folks in other countries know about the US where we don't know squat about any of you guys.

We're just self-centered I suppose

But.. Jimmy Hoffa? How do you know who that is? Just because we pipe all the media to you guys?

Well, Thomas mentioned you have a holiday sometime next week, and I had no idea what he was talking about.

3:58 AM

You've heard of Thanksgiving?

Yes, but I only have a very vague idea about it. Turkeys?

Also:

Hoffa is a 1992 biographical film directed by Danny DeVito and written by David Mamet, based on the life of Teamsters Union leader Jimmy Hoffa. Jack Nicholson plays Hoffa, and Danny DeVito plays Hoffa's fictional longtime friend Robert "Bobby" Ciaro, an amalgamation of several Hoffa associates over the years. The film also stars John C. Reilly, Robert Prosky, Kevin Anderson, Armand Assante, and J. T. Walsh. The original music score is by David Newman. Plot Most of the story is told in flashbacks, starting with Hoffa first meeting Ciaro and ending with one version of Hoffa's mysteriou...

Hollywood is probably the main reason non USA-ians know anything about the US ;P

Wow, I'll have to see that. And yeah, Turkeys. That's next week. To be fair americans only have a vague idea about it as well because in elementary school we were fed a bunch of total garbage

4:12 AM

@YannisRizos In review I was just pushed to a "late answer" that is to a question from a year ago, but the answer was posted a year ago? What gives?

0

A: Learning about the Facebook Platform

There are two different aspects in facebook platform. first is graph api, http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/, which is abstract concept and independent of the SDKs. [this used to be the old Rest API, but FB is not moving to graph api] Second is the SDKs that offer easier way to ...

23

Q: Please stop putting old posts into the Late Answers queue; aka Leave my spam alone

A long time ago1 in a galaxy far, far away (or certainly very far from the one I inhabit) three users were so desperate to get their silver Reviewer badge for the Late Answers review queue2 that they upvoted spam3. This wasn't just any spam; this was spam that is so old the link doesn't even wo...

feature-request review late-answers

...how do late answers get into the "queue" for review? I just presumed it was automatic

No idea.

I'm going to have to be more careful about when I post on late answers I review, thanks for mentioning that Q; Don't want to be adding unnecessary attention to questions that are old as sin just because I don't notice the questions post date

s/question/answer/g

4:53 AM

hi

right place for this i hope

Holy shit there's a goddamned C program to print the largest known prime number which is ten thousand times longer than than the fucking program itself.

bellard.org

5:41 AM

doh back to mathchat :( shame that there are no active chat rooms on SE it is a really nice webchat system

6:16 AM

@YannisRizos flagged one of my answers as you advised, will see how it goes

9 hours later…

3:10 PM

@gnat I took a look at your flag, and the votes do look suspicious. However, I can't see a pattern in them just yet. If you get a couple more votes against you, flag again and we should be able to identify the person stalking you.

1 hour later…

4:17 PM

great - thanks @BradLarson I'll re-flag if it persists

5 hours later…

9:21 PM

user image

user20683

10:07 PM

@YannisRizos Wow

user20683

is it me or are there an unusual number of highly vocal prima donnas who don't get the sites lately?

10:49 PM

what the hell lol

user20683

@JimmyHoffa ywah

user20683

*yeah

user20683

it's one of those "WAT"

user20683

things

I'll just chalk it up to a foreign teenager

Speaking of WTHs what was with that guy last night coming in here and posting something about the black funny-eyes dude from star trek?

user20683

10:54 PM

@JimmyHoffa no idea

I presumed it was a troll but he's relatively high scored over in a math.se

user20683

I flagged it as offensive

user20683

since as a Trekkie I don't take kindly to La Forge abuse

user20683

I suspect drunkeness

ah I didn't know I could do that, I just ignored it not to feed the troll but was rather confused why someone whose high scored with a grip of answers to complex questions would pop around posting stuff like that

user20683

10:56 PM

yeah

user20683

@JimmyHoffa Programmers isn't known for having a sense of humor

That may be, you never know what to expect when a mathematician gets drunk.. heh I was thinking more like the guys account was hacked

user20683

that's possible too

user20683

regardless, I flagged the two most offensive bits and went to bed

yeah programmers doesn't really which is a bit ironic because as a whole programmers tend to be really laid back, but it would only attract the wrong type to the site

user20683

10:59 PM

@JimmyHoffa yeah

It's interesting how professionals are so different inside and otuside of their jobs, I think that's likely true of a lot of professional jobs not just engineers; Doctors, Lawyers, any knowledge worker probably. Likely less so for managers and more people oriented professional positions

11:15 PM

@WorldEngineer You understand closures?

user20683

@JimmyHoffa sorta

user20683

my understanding in theory is that they are closed forms

I wrote a blog on them a while ago, as someone who isn't clear on them; would you read it and tell me if it makes sense? codewonderings.blogspot.com/2012/09/…

user20683

@JimmyHoffa I need to step out for a bit, I'll read it and get back to you

Sure, whenever

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