The Whiteboard

Thomas Owens

12:24 PM

@WorldEngineer lifeofasoftwareengineer.tumblr.com

I hope that's the right link. My friend runs it.

thorsten müller

1:00 PM

@ThomasOwens that's missing my initial desperation when I first saw the legazy code I took over from somebody else.

Thomas Owens

@thorstenmüller You can submit GIFs to him.

Or images. Still images work as well.

thorsten müller

@ThomasOwens I'm not that much into the meme images. Not enough anyway to know where to find one that would make a good match.

thorsten müller

1:41 PM

we should somehow auto reject all questions with "career", "degree", "bachelor" and similar in title or text...

user55340

@thorstenmüller I am a bachelor and looking for a career programmer wife who doesn't auto-reject me to the degree that I am currently experiencing. What SE should I post this in?

user55340

(I couldn't figure out how to work in "Masters" in there too...)

user55340

(Well, I could, but then it would likely get flagged...)

thorsten müller

@MichaelT looking for a wife would be Home Improvement, but you're looking for a career programmer, so that's more difficult, maybe Code review

user55340

@thorstenmüller Given the bachelor condition of my house... yes, a wife would entail some home improvement. Thank you.

user55340

1:56 PM

-5

Q: new to programming

I am interested in becoming a programming , I am starting off with learning Java from web/app dev. I am also interested in mainframes dev, what language should I learn whats the next step. Thanks in advance

mainframe

user55340

Given the tags on that, I'm tempted to say "COBOL"

Jimmy Hoffa

2:15 PM

@WorldEngineer that whole "What language should I learn next?" Blog article should totally be written.

Yannis Rizos

2:38 PM

Programmers Stack Exchange Blog: No Silver Bullets?

worldengineer on October 08, 2012

One of the most persistent questions I see on Programmers.SE is “What language should I learn?” and its endless legion of variations. These questions seem innocuous enough; beginners looking for insight into the hideously complex and bewilderingly partisan world of software development. It’s more than just languages too. Languages all have attached cultures and ecosystems. Not to mention an endless parade of varying implementations and the other attendant issues like third party libraries and the melting, gibbering insanity that is the world of software licensing. …

thorsten müller

Yes, we could remove this wall of text and add a javascript that randomly chooses a language out of a short list.

Jimmy Hoffa

I'm thinking more like this digibarn.com/collections/posters/tongues/… except made to be understandable and focussed on someone with a more basal understanding of languages

categorizing and explaining the categories and purposes with hints of "If you know category A, you may be lacking in skills category B can help with"

Yannis Rizos

Thank you for volunteering to write the post for our blog @JimmyHoffa ;)

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos ...I think I need to go write some code somewhere, right now.....

thorsten müller

At the end all arrows point at Haskell

Jimmy Hoffa

3:00 PM

@thorstenmüller and on the other end C++ "[the] octopus made by nailing extra legs to a dog.", where many languages try to be minimal, C++ you could say has decided to be maximal

user55340

3:13 PM

@JimmyHoffa How would one describe php then?

thorsten müller

3:26 PM

@MichaelT painting this octopus so it looks like a cockroach.

Jimmy Hoffa

4:20 PM

@MichaelT a punch-drunk octopus.

(dogtopus?)

Karl Bielefeldt

Starting to see articles like this pop up: foxnews.com/tech/2013/04/10/windows-xp-death-watch-begins I was curious what other teams are doing with their hardware that isn't vista/7/8 capable. How many people are trashing it versus installing Linux?

We've gotten new hardware for our main developer computers, but the old computers go to labs and meeting rooms, and were mostly XP. We've put Ubuntu on most of those.

Jimmy Hoffa

I frankly have no idea what happens to old hardware anywhere I've ever worked. New hardware comes in, IT guys go around swapping it out and carry off the old stuff; occasionally I'll be on some random file share or database machine and get told it's just some old machine being utilized for a small purpose, but usually I never hear another peep about it

Do kind of wonder where it all disappears to

user55340

4:54 PM

@JimmyHoffa The answer is, they sell it to an electronics "recycler" that ships it illegally to India where they have people unsolder everything to reclaim the metals in it (this is a very polluting process and thus the illegal aspect of it). I am being mostly serious...

Jimmy Hoffa

5:05 PM

@MichaelT Yeah, that's about what I kind of figured. Didn't know it was illegal or so pollutingly terrible.. lame.

This is why I don't go around trying to find out what corporations are up to, it just ruins your outlook

user55340

@JimmyHoffa pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june07/ewaste_02-19.html

gnat

6:16 PM

am I the only one feeling an urge to rollback changes made in rev 3 here? programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/194575/revisions It just doesn't feel right to see a canned summary for such a massive edit "deleted 1912 characters in body"

user55340

@gnat Yep. The original author added it for a reason. We can assume that that is part of the author's thoughts. Such a large deletion with no summarization of the material deleted in the text for no reason declared detracts from the author's ideas. While one can do it with the license, I see no reason why it should be done to delete that material.

Yannis Rizos

@gnat I'm not going to read all that (I'm writing a long response to a mod message right now), but if there's nothing offensive (to a reasonable person) in there, then removing such a big part of an answer is not a good idea. If that's the case, roll back and post a comment to the editor letting them know that edits that change the intent of an answer are a bit much.

user55340

"In practice," fair - although I wouldn't recommend someone think of the language itself that way. Can you structure this essay so it's more hierarchical and in particular skimmable? It has good content but is too broad for SE, especially when you just go into "how to learn programming." Make it more transparent how that is relevant w.r.t. OP. — djechlin 2 hours ago

user55340

Someone likely acted upon that. I don't completely agree with it. If you want to skim, summarize it at the top with a tl;dr.

Yannis Rizos

Yes, but it's an answer, not a question. We don't get to fix answers by editing them (that much), that's what downvotes are for.

gnat

6:28 PM

@user16764 your edit in rev 3 has been rolled back per discussion at Whiteboard: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/8916071#8916071 — gnat 24 secs ago

thorsten müller

6:40 PM

maybe he thought it's a bit too much a rant against php. but it's well written and no reason to allow it to be deleted and not even comment why.

Yannis Rizos

It's a rant against PHP? Kill it, kill it with fire!

user55340

@YannisRizos Kill PHP with fire? Get in line...

user55340

I ranted against clever code masquerading as dry and got it as the accepted answer... That still surprises me a bit.

Yannis Rizos

6:56 PM

@MichaelT Well played, here's a star ;)

user20683

user20683

This is Atlanta...because only male trees were planted for the Olympics...less clean-up my ass

user20683

7:12 PM

@JimmyHoffa There's this idea I had along with Ubermensh who has vanished from the face of the Earth: Fully Interactive Language Picker. Someday this will get done but for now I need to go run a lab for some students on Raspberry Pis.

Jimmy Hoffa

7:41 PM

@WorldEngineer there are some interactive language explorer things like that around

I think a broad ranging article may be a better approach and at the end you can just tell everyone to go read the SICP or what is that newer book, techniques and something bla bla that's a huge SICP like encyclopedia of everything?

That book had like a couple hundred pages dedicated to every paradigm including obscure paradigm categories

Ugh I can never remember the name of that book and it drives me nuts every time. Balls.

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programmin

amazon's "people who bought this also bought.." for SICP found it. The list was loaded with functional programming books as well, not surprisingly. Suppose your javaschool doesn't bother with the SICP. (Not that I've ever bothered with it or the concepts book, they're both wayyyy over my head I presume just like TAOCP)

There ya go, just cap off that languages blog article with epsa.org/forms/uploadFiles/3B6300000000.filename.booksingle.pdf

user41796

8:38 PM

@gnat - good catch and rollback on that answer BTW. I added a response to that user indicating why the edit wasn't an appropriate usage of editing.

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