The Whiteboard - 2013-08-29 (page 1 of 3)

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user55340

12:26 AM

I want to smack (waves arms about) people.

user55340

-1

Q: C printf warning

I'm stuck fixing ancient code, and here is today's issue: output_file_status = fprintf ( data_file, "%03d%08s%+014.2f%06.3f%", LongValue, CharStarValue, Double1, Double2 ); Lint32 produces: Lint32 results in “malformed format string” 1) Do you all agree the format string...

user55340

This question is off topic on Programmers.Stack Exchange because it is about debugging actual code (an implementation issue). It would best be answered on Stack Overflow, however, the question likely doesn't meet the minimum requirements for a question on Stack Overflow. Please read the Stack Overflow question checklist to fix up your question for migration. — MichaelT 2 mins ago

user55340

And a minute later...

user55340

0

Q: printf format string lint warning

I'm stuck fixing ancient code, and here is today's issue: output_file_status = fprintf ( data_file, "%03d%08s%+014.2f%06.3f%", LongValue, CharStarValue, Double1, Double2 ); Lint32 produces: Lint32 results in “malformed format string” 1) Do you all agree the format string can not end in a ...

lawl

user55340

12:28 AM

No where in there did I say "repost the question on SO". Instead, I pointed to the checklist... which has a very lengthy bit on how to ask a good SO question. I said that it could be migrated. Nope... reposted.

user55340

Apologies to forum, and MichaelT. I've posted in StackOverflow. Thanks also to Robert Harvey. It does compile. As this is ancient code, just trying to determine if it met the original requirements (missing) whilst converting this 'stuff' to 64-bit. — frododot 30 secs ago

the second one actually read far better, in terms of asking questions.

12:53 AM

Since you reposted the question over there, why don't you go ahead and delete it over here so it's not crossposted. For future reference, StackExchange is absolutely absolutely not a forum. Forums are for discussion, posting a question here is not analogous to posting a forum thread, rather a question here is meant to be a specific and answerable question that does not elicit discussion. Discussion is more than welcome in The Whiteboard Programmers.SE's general chat room. — Jimmy Hoffa 9 secs ago

*test*

*test*

Nope, can't do bold and italics with * and _ combinations

user55340

@JimmyHoffa You're saying four letter words again. Also in this category are "q__z" and "_x_m"

@MichaelT Ah, I didn't look that hard, I was just responding to the crosspost + his comment about us being a forum trying to set him straight so he doesn't continue wankering up our site.

1

Q: In a declarative language, specifically in the context of modelling, can we make a clear distinction between code and data?

For declarative languages, specifically (but not limited to) in the field of modelling, it's not obvious to me whether code can be considered to be separate from data. This line of reasoning may only apply to non-turing complete languages such as NeuroML. Say for instance I had a very domain spe...

modelling declarative-programming declarative

Cool question, I've had a similar sense and curiosity when thinking through problems with declarative languages, I could see how a non-turing complete DSL would make this stick out much more

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I was more doing a joke on 'test', 'quiz' and 'exam' all being four letter words and vulgarities to students (back to school!)

Oh, I thought you were saying his question was homework

Joke's on you, I wasn't a student for those to become vulgarities to me.

Now that I think about it, as of this year I've been a working programmer more years than I've spent in school

user55340

1:08 AM

So now the four letter word is "perl"?

php isnt four letters though

user55340

If @JimmyHoffa went back to geography class and they asked him "what state is this" he would certainly say "it shouldn't have a state, global states are bad and lead to impurities"

@MichaelT Nah, I'd just tell them it didn't matter so long as we don't share it.

user55340

State is a STD - practice pure functions.

1:42 AM

great. i managed to lock up visual studio doing a cut and paste

come on unintelisense, you can do it

YES OMFG. i dont know if any of you guys play guitar. but HOLY YES

2:15 AM

@Matt D: VS 2010 or 2012? Resharper on or off? HDD or SSD?

-3

Q: Where is the place of technical people in the big picture as compared to visionaries or business people?

Dear fellow programmers I'm the CTO and the lead programmer at our start-up. Our CEO came into office with hurry and asked me to reschedule so we can pick a very important customer at the airport. When at the airport, I realized the customer is actually more of a business man, a visionary (and a...

tech-industry business

2010, c# just intellisense HDD :)

^^^ ^^^ "Dear fellow programmers... I feel like we technical people are more of a tool, just a step, in the big scheme of things. One thousand of us could be replaced in a flash but one Steve Jobs can not be replaced by anything ..."

because ideas have value, and execution carries none.

@Matt D: Lately, I've had lockups with VS 2010. Really unacceptable.

apparently

2:17 AM

@Matt D: Ya - Apparently. Hm. :/

the difference between jobs and others, is that he cared about execution. it wasnt just the idea. it was the delivery of the idea.

it had to be right

something ideas people forget. because they're too wrapped up in the "ideas" bit. and not in the actual delivery of anything. Ideas are like assholes, everyone's gone them.

but hey, everyone wants to be able to come up with cool stuff and not have to put any effort in to see them become a reality, we are inherently lazy

The cult of middle management strikes again!

ok enough ranting, back to work

making shit for other peopel

god my typing sucks today!

3:17 AM

@MattD Because what good is money if you had to do the actual work to get it?

3:52 AM

"nothing is impossible for those who don't have to build it"

5 hours later…

9:11 AM

0

Q: Same question goes through close review queue twice, is that good or bad?

Recently stumbled upon a question that has been put into close votes queue twice: First round (3:1 Leave Open) Second round (4:1 Close) As far as I can tell, question entered the queue second time after "first round" votes on it expired and someone else cast a new vote. Is it good or bad tha...

discussion review vote-to-close

4 hours later…

user41796

1:17 PM

@gnat - got a moment for a few questions on the hotness formula?

user41796

1) I'm trying to understand how the denominator is supposed to work. Specifically, how is Qage - Qupdated calculated

user41796

are those based upon origin time of question? So opened 3 hours ago and last touched 2 hours ago would give (3-2)/2 ?

@GlenH7 I always got a moment for stuff like that. Denominator part, I do not fully understand it, I only can tell that per my observations, it appears to work smoothly. and I think (I hope:) I understand the purpose. Qupdated is there seems to be to adjust / balance for votes brought in by bumps, as opposed to "true" popularity...

...See, 3 edits => 3 bumps bringing 6 extra upvotes, give unjustified edge to question that hasn't been edited in the meantime. I am not 100% positive it's so, but my observations so far it felt that way. Sort of a measure to level playing field against bumps

user41796

Hmmm, okay.

user41796

it's kind of opaque at the moment. I'm working through an SO question stackoverflow.com/q/18507518/1345223 because I saw the hotness score off of the notification box

user41796

1:29 PM

it would be nice to see hotness score on P.SE questions

user41796

Is there any way to find that out? specifically, I want to make sure my interpretation of the algo is how it's coded

user41796

it's probably a bad sign when I'm thinking of returning to my control systems class and mapping this out properly... :-)

1:49 PM

@GlenH7 "hmm okay" is just what I thought when I figured that this stuff is complicated, but seems to somehow work (except for "sticky" questions, but these break everything, not just that). Have to admit, I still wouldn't mind to get a better understanding of it

user41796

@gnat Yeah, I'm not sure it's working as intended, to be honest

user41796

first off - my assumption is that the hotness score I see in the notification box is calculated the same way as Jeff lays out in that MSO post. I may well be wrong there because he has a comment to the effect of "SE hotness is different"

user41796

when I first saw that SO Q, it had a hot score of 176. 19 QScore, 652 Views, 10 Answers with a sum of 94

user41796

numerator is then: log(652)*4 + (10*19)/5 + 94

@GlenH7 there is a hot tab at the front page but it doesn't show value of the hotness score - programmers.stackexchange.com/?tab=hot

user41796

1:52 PM

which is 147.25

other than that the only way I know of seeing the score is through collider

user image

score value is shown to the left of the question title

user41796

for 147.25 to turn into 176, the denominator must be .83. And I can't see how to get to values of less than 1 with my understanding of the denominator

but there are questions from all sites, not only from Programmers

user41796

@gnat that's where I pulled that 176 from on the SO question. And it later jumped to 191. I haven't worked the stats for that one yet

I see

user41796

1:54 PM

I dug into site_name/posts/Q#/timeline to see revision history + actual times

user41796

Can not rely upon the relative times provided in the summary of the question

I think there is a chance for values less than some small number (1, or 2, or 9...) to be forcefully mapped to 0. Although this is not explicitly specified in the formula, this seems to be some sort of a natural cut, if anything to avoid extra calculations for scores that don't matter

user41796

need to run to a standup mtg, back in a few.

user55340

@GlenH7 It is hard to run while sitting down at a meeting. Have you considered treadmills instead of chairs?

user41796

2:10 PM

@MichaelT When I worked from home, I would set my laptop up on a stand over the treadmill and walk while I worked

user41796

I wouldn't mind something similar at this place, but likely ain't gonna happen

user41796

So the revised numbers: Collider score of 191. 765 Views, QScore 20, 10 Answers, AnswerSum of 103

user41796

comes out to 151.5 and a denominator of .79

2:26 PM

@GlenH7 Don't forget that the collider score you see may be cached; your read of that score followed by your read of the Q/A scores is not an atomic operation, so there's a race condition. Just saying.

user41796

@JimmyHoffa yes, there's definitely latency involved. And the collider box doesn't update automatically, I have to refresh the P.SE page I'm on in order to see updates to the collider

user41796

but now I have a 3rd data point on that Q

in Beginning Scala book, there is a whole large chapter discussing this topic in brief. Do you expect answers to your question here to cover it completely? Consider taking a look at guidance in help center: "Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much." — gnat 2 hours ago

I knew studying this book will be helpful, even though I don't intend to learn Scala :)

user41796

so u cant GIMME TEH CODEZ ?!?!

user41796

protip: using the timeline view of a question, you can see the vote splits

2:37 PM

Timeline view?

user41796

Si

how??

user41796

pattern is site_name/posts/Q###/timeline
example: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/posts/192046/timeline

do I need more rep?

user41796

nope; works wherever, afaik. I only have 313 SO rep and it works there.

user41796

2:39 PM

try going directly to the question, then editing the URL

interseting

is this an unreleased feature?

can't imagine that editing the URL to get access to this is intentional

user41796

Atwood originally released it back in '10 on a handful of sites. I've checked MSO, SO, and PSE, and it works for those 3

user41796

there's a declined feature request on MSO to advertise the timeline link automatically.

3

user41796

It's a neat trick, but I don't think it helps the general audience

39

Q: Add a link to the timeline of a post

Since a year I am quite active on SO and a bit on meta, but I have never heard of the timeline of a post, till today in a comment on meta. There has been an announcement by Jeff Atwood 2 years ago of this feature as "experimental". (Timeline for that question). This feature has been requested b...

feature-request status-declined timeline

user41796

2:47 PM

@gnat - I'm beginning to think there is a bug in how the denominator is calculated, or the formula Atwood was talking about is not the formula the Collider uses

user41796

or I really don't understand how they are getting the hourly ages on the question and last update

13

Q: Why bounty dropdown sometimes defaults at value larger than minimum allowed?

In this question, bounty dropdown defaults at value 250, while minimum allowed is 50 - why is that? To preemptively address ideas that this might be because question already had a 250 bounty (which btw would still make it confusing but whatever), dropdown defaulted at 250 even before any b...

support bounty usability

user41796

perhaps part of SE's reluctance to address the problems with the collider is a lack of understanding or familiarity with the existing implementation of the algorithm.

user41796

@gnat I note a degree of irony in putting a bounty of 50 on that one

@GlenH7 UTC?

user41796

2:53 PM

@JimmyHoffa I believe everything is stored as UTC. The algo uses relative amounts though, I think.

user41796

((qAge +1) - ((qAge - qUpdate)/2))^1.5

user41796

for the points I've taken on that one question, qUpdate has to be slightly larger than qAge to get the necessary amount in the denominator

@GlenH7 Do we know the local timezone of the server(s) ?

obviously everything is stored in UTC, they're not that stupid; that doesn't mean somebody didn't accidentally compare a stored DateTime to a DateTime.Now on accident instead of comparing it to DateTime.UtcNow

user41796

@JimmyHoffa oh, I'm not even trying to speculate as to how it's borked.

user41796

Just positing that it's borked

2:56 PM

@GlenH7 per my understanding of Atwood's post timelines, he admitted formula to be in the "beta" state and that they're still experimenting about a week after posting what is currently considered "official" algo...

2

A: StackExchange's question selection is horrible

Bear in mind we're still tweaking the question selection algorithm. So what you see, is very much a beta at the moment. Don't take the question selection right now as gospel. (and note even the OP has changed his question to indicate that things are better since he originally posted it)

@GlenH7 I'm speculating as to why your unable to identify the "age" variable

user41796

And neither Shog9 nor Anna are pingable in this chat at the moment. (at least not by me)

No one's around, but what's your specific question? Just want an update on the question selection algorithm specifics?

user41796

@ThomasOwens - trying to understand how qAge and qUpdated values are determined

Where is this equation actually posted? I don't see it anywhere.

3:01 PM

This Q is about to get smashed full of "Hey I know a cool tool, it's my favorite, you should use BlubWorks, it'll make everything better!"

0

Q: Need advice / task list suggestions for a Research-leaning R&D group IT setup

I'm involved in a research & development group of ~5 people, within a larger (but still pretty small) industrial R&D company. For reasons which I won't go into, our group is mostly isolated, and IT support from our company is limited (a summary list appears below). We need to set up our environm...

team research services development team-building

No it's not.

user41796

126

Q: What formula should be used to determine "hot" questions?

Right now the front page Popular tab is fairly broken -- it's a simple descending sort by views. As Joel said in podcast #18, it is "a self-fulfilling prophecy." But this is not intentional, it's only because we haven't had time to improve it yet! As I sit down to write a better algorithm, I tho...

discussion stackexchange-button hot-questions algorithm

@GlenH7 I'll ping and see if there's an answer. Not sure if it'll come in here or as an update to that Meta question.

user41796

that's fair.

user41796

Fundamentally, I want to understand how to calculate the score so I can run some experiments and show what might happen if suggested changes to the formula were implemented

3:04 PM

@ThomasOwens You disagree?

Is that a valid question and I'm just mistaken?

user41796

I was going to update gnat's open MSO request on tweaking the formula to show what would happen. And that digging shows it's implementation is not clear. Being old and wise, I'm pointing the finger at myself first for not understanding it correctly

user41796

@JimmyHoffa it's already on hold

@JimmyHoffa No. I made sure it won't get smashed full of crap answers.

Oh heh

Sorry but this is really not an appropriate question here; you can try a discussion forum or The Whiteboard which is the site's general chat room, but asking for lists or general suggestions really aren't questions that can have a single correct answer, so they're not allowed anywhere on the StackExchange network. Have a look at the faq. Feel free to post when you have a question about an actual problem, we'd appreciate the participation! — Jimmy Hoffa 2 mins ago

(When do questions pass from On Hold to Closed?)

Matt Эллен

(5 days)

3:07 PM

I kind of wish you could vote for on hold/closed wording

5 votes and it goes to whichever one got 3 of the 5

Some questions can't be edited out of on hold and it's clear from the start

user41796

@JimmyHoffa custom off-topic close reason doesn't cover that?

@GlenH7 I mean that the question says "On Hold" for 5 days, or you can vote for closure and the question just immediately says "Closed", the difference is the clarity of the messaging to the user, one says "This is simply not acceptable" the other says "This needs some work"

Many questions are the former not the ladder, but I guess it's best that we don't let the community decide whether the OP can resolve the problems with the question or not

user41796

@JimmyHoffa that makes more sense. Not sure how well that request would be received. You can flag for deletion too.

@jozefg how do you feel about validation systems that are combinator based using arrow composition. Like

data Person = Person { age :: Int, name :: String, creditScore :: Int, ...}; then canBorrow = ageOver 21 >=> creditScoreOver 210 >=> amazingnessIs True

I seem to not have enough reputation to log into the Whiteboard chat - even though 113 should be enough (and my 1,262 on SO should count for something). What to do? Anyway, while I agree my question is somewhat broad, I do not believe the site limits itself to questions with a single supposed correct answer, and mine is a practical question regarding software development. I can try to make it less broad, although I'm not sure how I might do so. — einpoklum 3 mins ago

Can anyone point to a meta post that identifies the site does require a single correct answer?

I know atwoods blog says so and the FAQ says so, but nothing feels more authoritative than the accepted answers on meta just because they're from the community you're trying to interact with

(I realize the FAQ is too, but many do not understand that)

user55340

Well, there's the blog post...

user55340

3:20 PM

Blog - Stack Exchange: Real Questions Have Answers

Jeff Atwood on January 17, 2011

In Good Subjective, Bad Subjective, we made a pretty solid first stab at defining a constructive subjective question, one that I’ve been happy with so far.

Constructive subjective questions:

inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”. tend to have long, not short, answers. have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone. invite sharing experiences over opinions. insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references. are more than just mindless social fun.

tend to have long, not short, answers. have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone. invite sharing experiences over opinions. insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references. are more than just mindless social fun. …

user55340

And then a MSO discussion of it...

user55340

7

Q: The halting problem - or - the fallacy of "real questions have answers"

I'm not going to make this a rant or a blog post, but just think about the natural consequences of "Real Questions Have Answers". That suggests that the person asking the questions knows that the questions is answerable (i.e. halts). Which, to the analytical mind, requires a the asker to at...

discussion feature-request questions answers

user55340

(which incidently appears to have been driven by the P.SE time of change given the author of the post and timing of the question)

user55340

And the rebuttal of the question:

user55340

19

A: The halting problem - or - the fallacy of "real questions have answers"

I'm going to assume that this is a serious request (excepting the last few lines) and not just a bit of leg-pulling (it's not Friday). Seems that one of the consequences of coming up with a famous quotation is that everybody either misquotes you or takes it out of context. This is what was actu...

user55340

3:22 PM

which finishes up with:

user55340

> "Real questions" don't necessarily have practical answers, but they do have authoritative ones.

@GlenH7 there is even more irony there...

user image

oh sh*t I forgot to check what was the default when I was setting bounty on that very question! — gnat 8 mins ago

as an ex-tester I feel ashamed

user41796

@gnat saw that... :-) Professional courtesy dictated not commenting upon it.

user55340

@GlenH7 Thats because you're an "engineer"... its part of the engineering code "do not rub another person's nose in their goof". Fortunately, real programmers (who program in fortran) are exempt from this. Though ironically, may of them were likely engineers too.

user41796

@MichaelT "no comment"

3:25 PM

Ok, managed to log into chat.stackexchange.net, it was a bit tricky.

@JimmyHoffa: thanks for the encouragement...

Anyway, some of the best questions on SO and other SX.net sites have multiple valid answers. Perhaps the best.

user55340

(the question in question? )

user55340

0

Q: Need advice / task list suggestions for a Research-leaning R&D group IT setup

I'm involved in a research & development group of ~5 people, within a larger (but still pretty small) industrial R&D company. For reasons which I won't go into, our group is mostly isolated, and IT support from our company is limited (a summary list appears below). We need to set up our environm...

team research services development team-building

@einpoklum No problem. You're always free to bring your discussion topics here, though to be certain; I'm not even certain what you were looking for in that question

user55340

Another MSO question that might be relevant (and it has two dup links...)

user55340

-9

Q: "not constructive" topics are sometimes the best SO topics

When I google for an answer, and one of the top hits is a stack overflow topic, it almost always (>90%) has been closed as being "non-constructive". I know there is a policy against topics that lead to debates, but my observation indicates that there must be value to aggregating "debates". When...

3:27 PM

Oh, I wanted some people to tell me "here's a list of 37 things you might want to install/set-up/look into" or "go read [some link], it deals with this situation".

@JimmyHoffa I like it

It reminds me in an odd way of some logic-y style programming.. I write similar code in the list monad or logict

@einpoklum I understand the sentiment; but understand this: The founders of SE were explicitly not creating communities for the participants, they created the game as a trick to get participation, but what they were wanting was to create a canonical information source where people could get accurate and correct solutions to their problems, these sites exist for googlers who do not participate, like wikipedia doesn't exist for the authors, SE doesn't exist for you and me

That's why there's all these rules to keep subjectivity at a minimum and disallow questions that are only useful to a single person, because the content the founders of SE wanted to gather was to be useful to the entire internet

@JimmyHoffa: SO has > 1,000,000 participants, and SX overall maybe double that. What's more, other people in my situation might Google my question and find the answers useful. I tried to make my question not so incredibly specific as to only have answers relevant for me.

@einpoklum The problem is googlers would find your question and the answers would be a list of thoughts from a bunch of different people, and googlers would have no way of knowing which answers are correct or incorrect

That's why poll questions are also explicitly off-topic across SE

user41796

anyone have the broken windows link handy?

user55340

3:32 PM

Another part of the puzzle is trying to keep the single to noise rather high (compared to forums). Part of that is to have filters in place to avoid having questions where everyone has an opinion or a little bit of knowledge to chime in on.

@MichaelT I use a singleton to keep my single to noise ratio high

@JimmyHoffa: But that's something which people in my situation would find useful, I believe.

Also...

user55340

This goes to that the ""Real questions" don't necessarily have practical answers, but they do have authoritative ones." bit mentioned above.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Ahh, the bachelor monad...

@einpoklum In any event; these rules are already in place, if you wish to debate them feel more than free to go to meta.stackoverflow.com and post your thoughts on the topic in the form of a question to ask about whether or not your question can be reopened

user55340

3:36 PM

@einpoklum There are many useful things the site is not (and other sites are). However, keeping the focus of the site keeps it being useful.

I just read Atwood's post, and he simply claims that questions should have answers, not single answers. He also gives additional criteria for what would be a good question which I think mine (at least potentially) meets:

- inspire answers that explain ... “how”
- tend to have long, not short, answers [albeit they'll be shopping-list-long]
- invite sharing experiences over opinions. [half-true, it invites sharing experiences but risks sharing opinions]
- are more than just mindless social fun.

@einpoklum If you feel strongly about this, I genuinely advise you post your thoughts on the matter in a question on meta.stackoverflow.com and ask people if this is an appropriate approach

user55340

@einpoklum if your question can have five correct answers from five different people, it doesn't have a single authoritative answer.

user55340

(let me hunt up a M.P.SE answer...)

@MichaelT Please keep it to MSO, we don't need any more of these questions on our meta within our community when they're the domain of wholesale SE anyway

3:38 PM

@MichaelT: Nobody ever said questions need to have single authoritative answers. Here's a poignant example: tex.stackexchange.com/q/29402/5640

example

user55340

-7

Q: Closed as not constructive?

Can someone explain why my question was not constructive? How do I take my web dev learning to the next level? The only answer given (likely before it was closed) clearly suggests that the question is constructive. I don't see the question as controversial or frankly that different from simila...

discussion support closed-questions

@MichaelT: My question was closed as too broad, not as non-constructive...

btw,

how do you make the chat quote part of the question like that?

Matt Эллен

there is no "not constructive" reason anymore

I think "too broad" is the replacement

user55340

@einpoklum Not Constructive doesn't exist anymore... many of them are 'too broad' or 'primarily opinion' now - which tries to separate the two parts of the old close reason.

@einpoklum I should have perhaps used the off topic close reason of requesting tool suggestions instead when I close voted it, I wasn't sure because it's not totally clear what you were asking for

sorry if too broad was confusing to you

user55340

3:42 PM

> There is the shot gun approach. Asking for a number of resources and getting a list of a few dozen books and blogs and bits of random advice back. Unfortunately, this is not a high quality approach - things get out dated, for someone coming to read more about it they are left with a truckload of material but no answer. Providing answers is what the Stack Exchange network is about - and some questions that are unanswerable are not appropriate to be answered on the site.

> Questions asking us to recommend a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Programmers as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.

That's one of the close reasons here

@MichaelT, @JimmyHoffa: So help me get constructive and narrowed-down... how would you narrow down my question to something more acceptable on the site?

@einpoklum Can you describe the question? I'm not totally clear what your situation and problem is

You're (heading?) in an R&D group that needs IT stuff done but don't have IT, so you want to ?

@JimmyHoffa: You just read it...

user55340

There's a lot of distracting background in the question... what is the core problem (ignoring the background)?

3:44 PM

Are you just asking for what kind of tools to use as an Software R&D group?

I (or rather me and others) need to set up a development environment for our group, network services and all, and I want some advice on what to look into getting or doing, other than the obvious stuff I listed.

@JimmyHoffa: No, what kind of things do people do when setting up a SW dev group,

when it's not product-release-oriented

@einpoklum See, at no point will asking for advice really work... and further "what kind of things do people do when setting up a dev group" does fall into too broad; there are quite literally books already written on the topic which is the defacto measure for too broad: Could you envision a book being written about it

If you can break your question down into sub problems you might get closer

So, how about "What are good books about etc. etc."?

as a question, I mean?

Or "where do I find information about etc. etc."?

> Questions asking us to recommend a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Programmers as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.

Again, that's one of our close reasons here

books, links, etc are not acceptable

You need a specific problem

But I have a specific problem, it's just a broad problem...

If there are books about it, it's specific, wouldn't you say?

3:48 PM

I would call that the opposite of specific :P

Alternatively, just ask us in here for our advice and we can share it

Actually, I suppose I could ask on one of the chat channels before I asked on the site.

off hand if you don't have IT folks, there's a lot of development services in the cloud these days

That hasn't occurred to me before.

@einpoklum I tend to always do this before asking questions on SE sites I'm not familiar with

people really appreciate it :)

anyone find learning a new language from a book is boring when it comes to learning the basics

3:49 PM

@JimmyHoffa: Maybe the FAQ about good questions should mention the chat.

@einpoklum Suggest it on meta.programmers.stackexchange.com as a feature-request

user55340

@Chrislast Very. Give me the syntax and then let me go do the first 50 Project Euler problems.

@Chrislast Yeah, I've long stuck to reference materials and example code for learning languages

Anyway, nothing can be on the cloud, for security reasons and because sometimes/always/not sure when, the network segment we'll be on will be cut off from the internet

The books come in when I get over the basics

3:51 PM

yeah because i know c++ and im trying to learn c

i also know java, and c#

user55340

@einpoklum P.SE chat is fairly reasonably active during business hours... even if we're not saying things, we're here.

@einpoklum Ouch, without IT folks that basically screws you. You can't hire IT folks, but can you get a consulting agreement from a company? One of those give us $XXX up front and we'll give you XXX hours of install and support time, we'll be on call and you just have to refill the meter when it runs out

and can anyone tell me if learning linux is hard. i have a course of that in college, and apparently we use linux to run our programming languages

@Chrislast: The problem is that there are books about C++ for people who know C, but I don't think the other direction is too well-developed. Try to think of C as a glorified Assembly language for a PDP-11 computer, that always works for me :-)

@Chrislast Not at all.

user55340

3:53 PM

@Chrislast using a command line linux system you're not admining is not difficult... just another programming language of sorts (shell). Admining a system can be more challenging.

@Chrislast you'll spend more time learning to use vim and gcc than anything else, and that's not saying a lot

@Chrislast: Linux is a big universe of things. Installing Linux and using it as an ordinary 'dumb' user on your desktop is not hard; configuring a lot of things is not hard (and getting easier with time); developing software is, surprisingly perhaps, easier than on Windows; but as you dig in deeper, things get somewhat harder.

i have no idea what those things are but okay

user55340

@JimmyHoffa vim-adventures.com

user55340

gcc isn't bad.

user55340

3:55 PM

@Chrislast vim is one of the more commonly used editors. gcc is the gnu c compiler.

@Chrislast (You don't have to learn VIM unless you really want to. gedit and gcc are fine)

i believe one of the professors at the orientation i went to said something about gnu compilers

@JimmyHoffa: So, really, are there actual books I could consult? I don't mind leafing through one.

unless your teacher is going to allocate time for you to learn VIM in your class, I'd say that you might be wasting your time

user55340

@Ampt Thats right... he should be learning ed! Ed is the one true editor! We don't use Vimsiators or emacisators... we use EDitors. So called visual editors were placed in /bin by the mighty ed to tempt the faithless...

user55340

3:59 PM

(in all honesty, I was joking there... don't learn ed unless you want to get deep into system admin and find yourself on systems where termcap isn't set up properly)

@einpoklum I'm sure there are, google immediately turns this up

amazon.com/Creating-High-Performance-Software-Development-Teams/…

I enjoy using gedit with syntax highlighting and gcc to compile

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