The Whiteboard

Ampt

12:37 AM

@WorldEngineer real programmers use punch cards. :P

user20683

12:56 AM

@Ampt real programmers are out of a job or retired.

user55340

1:43 AM

One more close vote please:

user55340

-3

Q: copy and paste from text box to text box

you can make a little program that copies the text of a text box on a web site?. I refer to the email address temporary guerrillamail. and to pass this argument to another text box to another website?

javascript

user55340

and if thats from a mod... read the comments. I'm going to cast a delete vote on it as soon as I see it closed.

user55340

2:03 AM

Evil CSS rule of the day - intensify.

user55340

animation: intensify .1s steps(5) infinite;
-webkit-animation: intensify .1s steps(5) infinite;
-moz-animation: intensify .1s steps(5) infinite;

user55340

(and if you want to be really annoying... dig into the css of this page)

Robert Harvey

6:31 AM

That's not the only difference : out does require you to assign something to the variable within the function, otherwise it's a compile error. — Carson63000 20 mins ago

Good God. The pedantry.

Duga

10:50 AM

Shouldn't this be on programmers.SE? — Pacerier 1 min ago

André

11:37 AM

Happy coffee day!

TZHX

coffee machine was broken (read: needed to be filled with beans) when I got into work this morning, not stood up yet to check whether anyone's done it. feel like a zombie.

Thomas Owens

@TZHX Don't you want to be a hero and legend?

Make that coffee!

(BRB - getting another cup.)

André

Make those bean do it's magic!

Save the cheerleader, save the world!

Thomas Owens

Trying to reconcile the customer or PMO driven "preliminary design" / "detail design" steps with iterative and/or incremental software development is not easy and may require extra coffee.

André

It's a "waterfall" project?

Thomas Owens

11:51 AM

Internally? Usually not. But the customers still have this notion of Preliminary Design Review and Critical Design Review and they can be tied to funding the next stage of the project.

It's not all customers, mind you. Just certain ones.

I think my next approach may be able to try to argue that the reviews are actually at a system level, and don't necessarily depend on every piece being defined to that level.

André

nods Not fun when customer not flexible to the company culture.

sounds reasonable

Thomas Owens

Even different groups from the same end customer have different takes on it.

I need to be in touch with some other organizations that do similar types of contracts to us and see how they handle it, I think. But I'm going to check corporate documents and reports first. Maybe someone has written something down and shared it.

André

eek, so many different expectations to deal with.

Jimmy Hoffa

12:45 PM

@TZHX this is the reason Keurigs are absolutely the best things for offices. How does that first pot get made? Zombieployees certainly can't be making coffee; they're stuck shambling around the office until somebody who's either not a coder or stopped at starbucks on the way in shows up to function the device. Keurig's can be used by the zombies; hell my kid makes our coffee at home with mine.

Happy coffee day

TZHX

@Jimmy I'll raise it as an "opportunity for improvement" with my manager. :)

Jimmy Hoffa

-1

Q: Does it make sense to use "ys" instead of "ies" in identifiers to ease find-and-replace functionality?

Although grammatically incorrect, when writing identifiers for functions, variables etc. does it make sense to simply append an "s" to plurals of words ending in Y? My reason for this would be that if you need to find-and-replace, for example, replacing "company" with "vendor", "company" would ma...

grammar

^--- I really want to close vote this, but I think it's actually a perfectly valid question

Perhaps I should just answer with intensified No!

It's on topic, clear, not too broad or narrow scoped, just...utterly lacking in value as far as questions go

Mathematics

So this is what they call programmers heaven ?

Jimmy Hoffa

@Mathematics O_o what's "this" ? Did you just have like 3 cups of coffee in a 15 minute span?

If you're climbing the walls, see if you can pull off the full exercist and turn your head around; that would just be cool.

Mathematics

@JimmyHoffa not a single cup of coffee, but i was working on WCF serialization/deserialization since morning though !

Jimmy Hoffa

12:57 PM

ugh

I wish I didn't know WCF so well, I'm glad to watch it dying on the vine as OWIN usurps the mantle of service hosting pipeline and REST/JSON replace RPC. IPC > RPC every time

Mathematics

I have a really big problem though, I had a feeling but wasn't sure, I have been working with C# for last 4 years, but I am so shit with it that I didn't knew how to use setters and getters

any advise other then changing job would be appreciated

I am a graduate, I studied it numerous times, but I keep forgetting it

I don't even know how to develop a simple CRUD application following best practices

Jimmy Hoffa

When did you graduate? This is your first job?

Mathematics

yup, in 2011

I have been working on SharePoint, C#, JS, WebServices and what not

Jimmy Hoffa

4 years at that company? Do the other devs in your office do good work- the software doesn't have lots of bugs? Passes test dept pretty easily? Doesn't get lots of support issues in production?

Mathematics

we have been hiring junior developers, not even a properly trained single senior developer ever worked with us

which is why we never focused on best practices

but had strategy of "Get it done"

Jimmy Hoffa

1:03 PM

Those first couple few years it's really important to have good mentorship- fresh grads have no damn clue what they're doing, and will never build those habits without good software in front of them and good people keeping them on track.

not telling you to switch jobs; that's just probably why you have trouble remembering basics like use getters and setters

Mathematics

@JimmyHoffa Exactly that's what happened, now I want to get back in game, I think pluralsight courses might help me + do some development on my own on weekends

Jimmy Hoffa

Alls I can say is practice more. Often times your job won't stand for you going off and creating new designs and structures in the system which stinks, but that's the practice you need to do. That and trying to answer stuff on SO/P.SE can get you to start thinking about what you're dealing with a little more thoroughly.

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa In addition to good mentorship, why don't we teach kids in school how to build good software? Perhaps having professors with some level of industry experience (like encouraging sabbaticals and such to stay in touch with the field), internships and co-ops at least being supported by the school (if not mandatory), and teaching more software engineering instead of theoretical computer science at an undergraduate level?

Jimmy Hoffa

If you have the time, start coding on the side

@ThomasOwens As someone who's self taught I've believed for a long time that there's no such thing as a teacher, only a learner, and we simply don't know how to help people learn certain things in a formal way like that. Mentorship is the only thing I've ever seen truly help someone learn software. Perhaps there's a way to do it in an academic environment, but empirical evidence suggests no one anywhere knows it yet.

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa Have you ever read Steve McConnell's Professional Software Development?

Jimmy Hoffa

1:08 PM

@ThomasOwens I don't care what republicans have to say about software, they just want to import developers to keep wages down

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa o_o

Jimmy Hoffa

I think the "wizard academy" or whatever that fancy bust-your-ass-on-a-computer-for-years might have the right of it; what little I've heard they don't formalize it, but rather keep it an interactive engagement study much more closely related to mentorship

Mathematics

@ThomasOwens I started programming when I was in 9th Grade... I have been working with it for last 10 years atleast, I think mentor-ship is the way to go

my biggest weakness is that, I can build softwares without understanding the code properly

Thomas Owens

@Mathematics Mentorship is important. That's why people who teach people should have industry experience. You can't teach what you don't know. It's also why schools should support internships and co-ops, especially for people who want to enter industry instead of going into academia.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens (pun) - and no, I haven't; I'm not a big reader of books. Why do you ask?

Thomas Owens

1:11 PM

Anyway, McConnell has chapters on software engineering versus computer science, software engineering versus software engineering, university education, certification, licensure, and codes of ethics (among other things).

Ideally, someone coming out of a 4 year program should be able to generally function in an industry setting. They may need to learn the company's methods, but they shouldn't need to be learning basic things like version control (some people don't know this by the end of their 2nd year) and unit testing.

A lot of these things can't be taught in a textbook or tested on an exam. But they can be incorporated and students exposed to good development practices. And if someone is at university, they should be getting these things in the coursework that they are paying for, and not just on the Internet.

Mathematics

Is there any generic design pattern you could use in any C# software you develop

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens Ideals are great, like I said though- empirical evidence suggests that's not the right environment to do it... There is simply nowhere generating functional graduates to my knowledge.

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa The program I went to is.

Many of the people I graduated with, in their first 5 years of industry experience, are either advanced individual contributors in their organization, team leads, or project leads.

And that's been happening for years now.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Mathematics no silver bullets my friend. I use the think-hard-about-the-problem-be-critical-of-all-solutions pattern. Or think-hard-try-harder is I believe the colloquial name.

@ThomasOwens interesting. Where's that?

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa Software Engineering @ Rochester Institute of Technology.

Jimmy Hoffa

1:18 PM

@ThomasOwens did they do lots of internship/co-op stuff?

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa 4 quarters mandatory. I did two double blocks, so I worked for 6 months each at two companies.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens so what you're saying is there's no evidence to suggest it was the formal academic environment that caused the results you're pointing at.

Thomas Owens

Plus most of the faculty had some level of industry experience, either before working in academia or through occasional 3-6 months sabbaticals. There were also a few adjunct and instructors who still worked in industry.

Jimmy Hoffa

Rather, there's evidence that might be showing a correlation between an increased ratio of internship-time-vs-academic-time and increased resultant graduate skill level, when you compare that institution with others that have higher academic time and lower internship time.

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa You may say that, but even on co-ops, students from RIT (across all programs, not just software engineering) are praised for their ability to contribute to the company.

Jimmy Hoffa

1:22 PM

@ThomasOwens perhaps, but that's an independent data point - find me a control that shows average reviews of internship/co-op contributors from other universities

Thomas Owens

I'm not sure if there are any empirical studies. Someone should do one.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens it's academia- skewing statistical studies on their effectiveness are how they suck money out of the GDP - I'll bet there is one.

Universities have studies with comps for nearly everything, unfortunately they're never independent, unbiased, or publicized if they can't be twisted to say something marketable. Which is sad because as organizations go, you'd hope for better from them

@Mathematics seriously, trying to fit some reusable pattern to all your problems is how everyone ends up with so many problems. Think about the problems you have and come up with novel solutions. Try those solutions and be critical of the results. Rinse and repeat. The last step is the important part because that's what keeps you from repeating the same mistakes. Commit that process enough times and you'll start seeing pitfalls in solutions quickly, and create solutions with less and less problems.

Thomas Owens

Speaking of patterns, I saw the Alexander book in the bookstore yesterday. I flipped through it and almost bought it.

Jimmy Hoffa

Alternatively, go learn Haskell and become a better programmer in 21 days! Though no one will understand you anymore, and you'll have a raging migraine for those 21 days. No guarantee of success, at the end of 21 days you still may not have learned Haskell. The migraine will subside in time.

Mathematics

Lol, I am thinking about going through this course,

blog.pluralsight.com/learning-path-csharp

Object-Oriented Programming Fundamentals in C# 4h 22m
Defensive Coding in C# 4h 32m
Clean Code: Writing Code for Humans 3h 10m
C# Interfaces 2h 52m
Abstract Art: Getting Things “Just Right” 2h 08m
Dependency Injection On-Ramp 2h 38m
SOLID Principles of Object Oriented Design 4h 08m
Design Patterns On-Ramp 3h 31m
Design Patterns Library 15h 01m
Total 42h 26m

André

1:30 PM

Haskell is the one true way

Jimmy Hoffa

Jul 14 at 15:02, by Jimmy Hoffa

@Ampt Have you accepted Haskell into your home, and into your heart?

@Mathematics blech. 4h on SOLID? O_O they should throw out everything else they're doing and spend the entire time on SOLID. The rest of what they have their is crap.

15h on design patterns!! UGH DO NOT DO THAT

Thomas Owens

I can teach everything that you need to know about design patterns in an hour.

Jimmy Hoffa

design patterns...yuck, you'll walk out of their wanting to use abstract factory manager repository service locator flywheels on EVERYTHING and even worse you'll think it's GOOD

André

I thought we were talking about enterprise java for a moment

Jimmy Hoffa

@Mathematics seriously, take a break from C# for a minute and go learn Haskell in your free time; just spent a week studying and working with it for a couple hours after week. One week, afterwards if you don't find it exceedingly odd and clearly something you've no concept of, go ahead and stop. If you realize however it's full of things you never learned before, keep going and you'll find out those things you never learned are actually terribly useful even in C# (heck, especially in C#).

Pushing further on C# you're likely to just fall into some nasty OO traps

especially since you have no mentor to pull you out of them and rub your nose in your messes

Mathematics

1:39 PM

do you mean go through there tutorials - wiki.haskell.org/Introduction

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens let me guess, you show him what a repository is, and then make him write "DESIGN PATTERNS ARE NOT SOLUTIONS" over and over for 45 minutes?

Mathematics

@JimmyHoffa Repository = CRUD operations or in other words business logic should go in it ? that's what i think it is

Jimmy Hoffa

@Mathematics however. I like Learn You a Haskell personally, but learn from multiple sources, tutorials, articles, books, try different things and see what works for you

Mathematics

I like functional programming btw !!

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa No. It goes like this. I would walk in and throw down the GoF book. And then I'd pretty much read the introductory sections, before the pattern catalog, then I'd say that you can ignore the rest and go on a rant about how design patterns are communication tools and not solutions for problems and you need to design solutions that are appropriate for you.

Jimmy Hoffa

1:43 PM

@ThomasOwens so long as the pattern names cause flashbacks, I think the training would be effective

Thomas Owens

Boston's mayor is holding a last minute press conference about the Olympics bid. I hope he says that he is saying to call it off.

Jimmy Hoffa

for anyone who hasn't learned the reason why tabs vs. spaces is a war (which means you like tabs not spaces) here is the reason - it's an actual rational logical one based on being thought out:

agghh tabs?!? TABS!?!? GAHH you make me weep. The tab character displays differently in different editors, terminals, et al - you might as well tell him to stop coding in a fixed space font... no, this is terrible. Try reading a code file with tabs in 4 different editors and see 4 completely different looking bodies of text. Yuck. — Jimmy Hoffa 1 min ago

Thomas Owens

1:58 PM

I don't understand the hate for tabs. The fact that it displays differently is a good thing - my view of the code is what's easy for me to read. It's not like it changes line numbers. That would be bad.

I prefer 2 space indentation. But if someone else likes 3, 4, 5, or 10, let them view it that way.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens no no no, it's not a good thing when you try opening a file you wrote in vi and suddenly it looks totally different

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa If I use vi, I would configure it to display it the way I want to see it.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens the code should look the same every time you view it

Thomas Owens

But I use one editor and one editor only.

And it looks the same every time I open it. If I did use multiple editors, I'd configure them all the same way.

Problem solved.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens bah, reasons arise, you never know what you'll need to use to edit a snippet of code in the future

Thomas Owens

2:01 PM

How does that matter?

Jimmy Hoffa

No one get's a unique view, no program get's a unique view - the code should look the same for everyone everywhere so when a colleague comes to help you out or review code with you it's easy to read for them, and when you go do the same it's easy for you

Just so it looks more pleasing to you is no excuse for a set of code files to look differently between different places

@ThomasOwens because when you've got to quickly get a patch from some recovery environment that only supports some viewer with fixed-space-tabs rather than dynamic-tabs and you end up stuffing a bug into production or losing 4 hours just trying to make sense out of the spaced out bizarre code, it matters

Duga

2:21 PM

This would be better suited to programmers.stackexchange.com — Liam 51 secs ago

enderland

@Duga hey a question where it's more likely a good idea to migrate

Duga

software architecture and design is specifically on topic on programmers. — Liam 15 secs ago

Thomas Owens

Someone should do the math. The mayor of Boston said that the majority of opposition to the Boston Olympics was "10 people on Twitter". The latest WBUR/MassINC poll of 500 registered voters in MA showed opposition at 50%, with a margin of error of 4.4%.

Apparently, "10 people on Twitter" ~= 228 people surveyed ~= 3,075,906 people?

Jimmy Hoffa

2:40 PM

Not sure if the guy is trolling or not - but he managed to create a tabs vs spaces firepit on P.SE - not an easy feat, we tend to be pretty fire proof around here... that's just hilarious.

I think this comment sums up the whole thing best:

Could be a question for martialarts.stackexchange.com ? — soru 39 mins ago

Thomas Owens

Is fight club-style stuff on-topic on Martial Arts?

If not, then I need to delete that comment as being inappropriate and guiding people to the wrong site.

Jimmy Hoffa

> The first rule of tab club is: You do not talk about tab club.

user55340

@ThomasOwens there is at least one outstanding rude flag for someone to poke at.

ratchet freak

@ThomasOwens in the off-topic section:

> Martial arts movies, comics, science fiction, or fantasy

enderland

@KentAnderson Yeah but I got banned from Workplace.SE. Anyway this is more about software development. And nobody clobbers me, I do the clobbering. — CaptainCodeman 6 mins ago

heh

ratchet freak

2:44 PM

martialarts.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic

Thomas Owens

@ratchetfreak It's not a question about the movie. It would be questions about street fighting or something. MMA style fights to the death.

user55340

@enderland he's likely on the way there on other sites.

jane

cool, I like this chat room :) (totally out of topic tho) moving on...

enderland

@MichaelT with that charming personality I can't imagine why

lol

user55340

And that was a reference to an old Sliders episode.

jane

2:47 PM

okay, just a curious question... do you guys know some great girl programmers? Or is it really that rare for a girl to be a programmer?

enderland

@jane yes and yes

user55340

@jane I've worked with some. They are out there. I tend to see them more in entrepreneur environments than line of business work.

Telastyn

I don't personally know any great programmers that were born female.

durron597

@jane I think the low ratio of great female programmers to male programmers is cultural, not biological

There are plenty, it's just a male dominated industry.

user55340

When you find the female coders on p.se that have profile pages, many are contractors for specific things or working in small creative shops.

user55340

2:51 PM

Digging into this profile (linked from reddit programmer humor):

jane

Can you name a popular programmer that is girl?

user55340

Programming is a constant struggle between "What is harder: Implementing it myself, or understanding the existing, undocumented solution?"

Tweeted by mcclure111 on July 8, 2015 at 4:00 AM

durron597

In this last round of hiring, there were only two candidates we even considered extending an offer to. The one in second place was female, we didn't hire her because the first place guy was just better. But she was better than all the other candidates, of whom we would have preferred to hire no one (if we couldn't hire the guy we did hire or her)

Telastyn

I don't suppose Ada Lovelace counts?

jane

searching...

durron597

2:53 PM

Women in computing

Global concerns about current and future roles of women in computing occupations have gained more importance with the emerging information age. Historically, women played a crucial role in the evolution of computing, with many of the first programmers during the early 20th century being female. These concerns motivated public policy debates addressing gender equality as computer applications exerted increasing influence in society. This dialogue helped to expand information technology innovations and to reduce the unintended consequences of perceived sexism. == Gender gap == A survey, conducted...

jane

Hey, a girl programmer how inspirational :)

durron597

@AshleyNunn Why don't you want to learn to be a programmer?

Thomas Owens

@jane Margaret Hamilton.

user55340

Grace Hopper.

jane

wow, I suddenly idolized Ada Lovelace thanks for introducing her @Telastyn

Telastyn

2:55 PM

np

user55340

Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939 as Barbara Jane Huberman) is an American computer scientist who is an institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ford Professor of Engineering in its School of Engineering's electrical engineering and computer science department. == Life and career == Liskov was born in 1939 California, the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children. She earned her BA in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. In 1968 she became one of the first women in the United States to be awarded a Ph.D. from...

Telastyn

though it's mildly embarrassing that she's all I could come up with

user55340

Grace Hopper

Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944, invented the first compiler for a computer programming language, and was one of those who popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches (in one instance, removing a moth from a computer). Owing to her...

2

jane

Well I'm worse than you because I'm asking ;)

Thomas Owens

Margaret Hamilton (scientist)

Margaret Heafield Hamilton (born August 17, 1936) is a computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In one of the critical moments of the Apollo 11 mission, Hamilton's team's work prevented an abort of landing on the moon . In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language based on her paradigm of Development...

jane

2:56 PM

Haha, girls aren't hopeless at this industry after all!!

user55340

Many of the coders working with Turing were women.

ratchet freak

@MichaelT because all the men where sent to the front

user55340

Exactly.

jane

mostly when I try to search some popular ones.. they are web designers of some fashion website or something.. and I believe I need more than that. hehe

Telastyn

also, programming was seen as fancy data entry at that point.

secretary's work

durron597

2:57 PM

@jane Culturally, men are encouraged to go math in school, and women aren't. A strong math background really helps when going into programming

ratchet freak

Eloraam is a coder/electrical engineer famous for a vaporware minecraft mod

jane

searching...

user55340

And there is the comfort with the computer. Teenage boys playing with minecraft stereotypes.

ratchet freak

here twitter is here: twitter.com/TheRealEloraam/with_replies

user55340

Glance also at thatconference.com/Speakers

jane

2:59 PM

wow, she's cool!

durron597

@jane I went to undergrad with the author of this book

André

Anyone has some experience with Heroku? Or someone can point me to a free (or really cheap) java server?

durron597

Wow, 6 editions? What have I done with my life, lol

user55340

Evi Nemeth

Evi Nemeth (born June 7, 1940 – missing-at-sea June or July, 2013) was an engineer, author, and teacher known for her expertise in computer system administration and networks. She was the lead author of the “bibles” of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook (1989, 1995, 2000), Linux Administration Handbook (2002, 2006), and UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (2010). Evi Nemeth was known in technology circles as the matriarch of system administration. Nemeth was best known in mathematical circles for originally identifying inadequacies in the “Diffie–Hellman problem...

Jimmy Hoffa

@durron597 you have a grad degree?

jane

3:02 PM

so math is a foundation to become a great programmer? I suck at math.. -.-

user55340

A certain level of competence. Not deep math. But understanding the process of logical reasoning.

jane

Well, I'm solely holding on to logical reasoning and basic understanding of math, but these women you introduced to me are inspirational... :)

haha

Anyways, gotta sleep! Nice chatting with you guys :) Goodnight!

user55340

@jane stop by any time.

user55340

Oh, don't forget our own inspirational female coder.

user55340

Anna Lear ♦, New York, NY

26.1k 6 81 121

.net c# java programming-languages unit-testing web-development self-improvement

Ampt

3:09 PM

@ratchetfreak vaporware? Redpower is used a ton in the heavily modded MC world

not sure about the new "game" coming out, but the mod is real.

ratchet freak

@Ampt but not updated and it was a endless wait for the latest version which has a major bug

and is 3 versions out of date

user15026

@durron597 because I don't have the brain for it? Not everyone has to learn to code.

Ampt

@ratchetfreak that's still a far cry from vaporware....

user15026

It would be like asking people why they don't learn to cook or learn Russian or whatever.

user15026

Not everyone wants to/needs to.

user15026

3:12 PM

I've tried it, it did not work for me.

durron597

3:25 PM

@AshleyNunn I was mostly asking you to weigh in on @jane 's questions.

@JimmyHoffa No

user15026

3:49 PM

@durron597 I don't really have anything to say that would answer them? Because I am not a dev what so freaking ever so I am not sure what sort of input you are looking for from me?

durron597

@AshleyNunn Never mind.

user15026

I'm mostly just really confused is all. If you can clarify what part you are curious as to my opinions on, I probably could find an opinion or ten, I just as a general thing don't know where to start.

user15026

I mean I am mostly not a dev because I would be a terrible one as I don't have the right analytical brain. It's all rainbows and fluff and butterflies up in here. Which works for some stuff just really not for dev stuff

user15026

Like one of the questions I always want to ask devs is "how do you know what to do?" because you seem to be able to break down stuff into parts so it can be constructed and I just don't even get that as a concept. I am just like "it's magic, they're magicians"

enderland

@AshleyNunn you can learn how to do this (if you want, at least)

durron597

3:56 PM

@AshleyNunn Well you're obviously interested in technology, you work in tech support, you hang out in here, yet you're not interested in being a dev. I thought you would have things to contribute to the conversation or at least find it interesting. I didn't know what exactly you would say, or I would have said it :-P

user15026

And I know a bunch of female presenting developer types, who are rocking at what they do, I just don't really want to be one of them because it's not a thing I feel a huge need to work at. I don't want to do it all day. Or at all, really.

enderland

I basically taught my friend how to program - at least the basic framework - over a few years, he does all sorts of cool stuff now

user15026

@durron597 I like tech as a thing, and I like support as a thing (when people don't question my abilities just because they hear my ladyvoice on the phone), but I have always been more of a supporter than a builder

user15026

I hang out here because you guys are interesting, supportive, and we talk about fun stuff like food and alcohol.

durron597

@AshleyNunn And coffee. Especially coffee.

Which reminds me, brb kitchen

user15026

4:02 PM

I have tried to learn various dev things (Python, Javascript, that terrible semester I tried to take intro to programming and they used Scala and it was a terrible stress pile) and it just makes my brain hurt. Give me a epic poem to analyze or an an author's motivation to question or a social justice thing to poke a stick at, I'm happy. Give me dev stuff and I just stare at it going "how do you even start? It's like trying to learn Japanese underwater or something.

user15026

You all manage to learn multiple languages and frameworks and all this complex stuff, and it just blows my mind. I know it takes work, but still.

user15026

I worked on Javascript for months (there was so much crying, ask @worldengineer) and I still don't inherently understand how the whole if...then...else thing works.

user15026

I know a lot of ladies locally who manage to rock out at this, I just know I am not one of them. Give me routers to program and computer parts to poke at, that works for me.

durron597

@AshleyNunn I've tried to read epic poetry and it just... never works out.

Same with Shakespeare and Joyce.

@JimmyHoffa @RobertHarvey nickcraver.com/blog/2015/07/27/why-you-should-wait-on-dotnet-46

Jimmy Hoffa

@AshleyNunn have you tried just using one of those Arnold soundboards instead of your own voice? Might have better results. "I'm having troubles getting logged into the system.." "Get to the choppah!"

user15026

4:11 PM

@durron597 it's nog for everyone, that's for sure. But it is something I can do. Or at least it was something I did long enough to get a degree in it :p

user15026

@JimmyHoffa I used to have one off those voice changer toys as a kid, I could use the Darth Vader voice from that

Jimmy Hoffa

@AshleyNunn I encourage this behaviour. This would be perfect because everyone presumes Darth Vader's running all support centers, so they'd be highly confident in your abilities as they'd immediately know they were speaking to the manager.

user15026

Excellent, I will have to ask my mom to see if she still has it then :p

Respect My Authoritah

Some things look like magic even to programmers until they learn them

Jimmy Hoffa

4:35 PM

@RespectMyAuthoritah like Haskell. Oh wait, that actually is magic...

Respect My Authoritah

Pure functional programmers are wizards to me.

Duga

Questions that ask "where do I start" are typically too broad and are not a good fit for this site. People have their own method for approaching the problem and because of this there cannot be a correct answer. Give a good read over Where to Start, then address your post. — gunr2171 58 secs ago

user55340

@Duga that was a false positive. That said, I like the linking to my meta post.

Jimmy Hoffa

4:54 PM

@durron597 everybody knows epic poetry is a write-only technology; like Perl, right @MichaelT?

Really, perl and epic poetry are interchangeable concepts.

Black Perl

Black Perl is a famous piece of Perl poetry. It was posted to Usenet on April 1, 1990. It is written in Perl 3 and will not parse under Perl 5. Multiple independent updates to Black Perl to make it parsable in Perl 5 have been published. The full text of the poem is reproduced below. == Attribution == While the poem itself is signed Larry Wall, the original message was posted with forged message headers, causing uncertainty of authorship. Sharon Rauenzahn, born Hopkins, has been suspected, but has denied authorship. Randal Schwartz has claimed that Larry Wall is in fact the author, and later on...

durron597

@JimmyHoffa Did you see the .NET 4.6 bug?

enderland

@AshleyNunn the trick is to not worry about the code at all for a while, and try t othink about "what do I need to do, in words?" and then once you can do that, the code starts to "magically" come :)

durron597

@JimmyHoffa perl.plover.com/obfuscated

enderland

(if you don't want to have this convo let me know too, I don't really care, but having seen nearly exactly what you said verbatim before and having worked with that person to teach them to code it peaks my interest) :)

Jimmy Hoffa

5:10 PM

@durron597 yeah, 4.6 is nothing I've been looking at for showtime anytime soon. To be sure- it really doesn't have a lot selling it. 4.5 brought us language level monadic coroutines which are cool, but there's nothing new or interesting in 4.6 beyond sugar and under-the-covers performance changes that I've seen. And 4.5 performs plenty well for me.

durron597

@JimmyHoffa And, apparently, bizarre bugs.

Jimmy Hoffa

@durron597 TCO is cool but it's complex enough they've avoided really bringing it to the forefront in .NET (it's had support for some time), it's not surprising they finally try to really tie it into the JIT and start finding pitfalls.

Robert Harvey

5:25 PM

@durron597 Yikes. I forwarded your link to my boss.

Thanks for that.

durron597

@RobertHarvey You're welcome

Not sure who else in this room that might affect, but I knew I should tag you two.

user41796

We're just now flirting with 4.5

Telastyn

bug?

/me looks

user41796

Today's heresy: I wonder if educational institutions focus too much on OO "design" and not enough on "just solve the problem already."

durron597

@GlenH7 When I went to school they focused too much on big-O and not enough on "things that you actually need to know when it stops being homework"

user41796

5:29 PM

Had another candidate fail at fizz buzz and a project eulor factorial question. Took over 30 minutes and still didn't get it

enderland

hmmmm pretty intense thunderstorm right now, always fun

user41796

@durron597 Yeah, the amusing part is the candidate could immediately tell me the big O for my approach and their approach

user41796

but they couldn't code the O(n) approach to save themselves

Robert Harvey

@GlenH7 I've been reading "Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise, 2nd Edition." It talks about this, plainly stating that, as an industry, we may have overstated the benefits of OO. Their pointed remark: "If you just need a method, then write a method instead of creating a new class."

user41796

Yes. Exactly

user41796

5:31 PM

I didn't ask for a class, I asked for a method

enderland

> Possible severe storms 60-80mph wind gusts with damaging winds. Stay away from windows and avoid going outside.

Robert Harvey

It's quite amazing how much time they spend in the book on people issues. They don't even get to actual architecture from a coding perspective (LSP, SRP, etc.) until Chapter 4.

enderland

immediately go look out the window!

user41796

@enderland Midwest FTW!

durron597

@enderland s/look/stick your head/

user41796

5:32 PM

@RobertHarvey I may have to dig into that one then

enderland

:)

Thomas Owens

@GlenH7 It would be nice if schools taught design, period. Good or bad.

user41796

How does it compare to something like McConnell's Code Complete?

user41796

@ThomasOwens Agreed. 30+ minutes later and all I had determined was that they couldn't design code and they didn't understand what it was doing

enderland

everytime this comes up I want to interview, just to see how well I do. lolz

Robert Harvey

5:34 PM

Code complete is different. It's been awhile since I read it, but Code Complete is much more about code than it is about architecture or architectural principles.

user41796

@RobertHarvey That's good to know. I'm going to put the Architecting ... book in my queue to read

user41796

@durron597 - How about "Write a unit test for ..."

durron597

@GlenH7 The problem is, 100% of candidates wrote the answer all in one method.

So you have to do at least some refactoring to separate the loop from the conditional logic.

user41796

I like that because I like to see how they recover from their code tripping them up

durron597

I also didn't want them to bother mucking about it testing framework annotations, I was testing "do you know what a test is" not "do you know how to use JUnit"

Well, I tried to give lots of guidance. "You'll have to refactor your existing code" but I wonder if that confused more than helped.

user41796

5:38 PM

possibly confused, hard to say though

user41796

To be fair, it's tough being an interviewee when you're not confident of your skills. Heck, it can be tough even when you are confident.

user41796

So I always try to give an allowance for feeling nervous

user41796

today's candidate used a public const int foo ... in one place and then used public static readonly bar ... in another case. Had no conceptual understanding of why const vs. readonly and what happens when you declare static.

durron597

Anyway, I like adding testing to a question where the initial problem statement is pretty not testable.

Do you provide an ide or even a computer, or all whiteboard?

I gave them eclipse on a projector.

Robert Harvey

Does Windows 10 include .NET 4.6?

user41796

5:43 PM

@durron597 All whiteboard. I don't care about perfect syntax at this point, and tell them as much

durron597

@GlenH7 Yeah it's hard to give a refactoring assignment when you don't provide an IDE.

user41796

I want to focus on design and see if they realize things like int foo = 7/3 results in truncation.

durron597

I hear that. Okay going to get lunch

user15026

6:07 PM

@enderland sorry, was lunching with a Google friend. I mostly just don't know how to go from 'I want this thing to do whatever" and "this is how we start to make it do whatever*. Add a fundamental issue with keeping the how's and what's of whatever language I am working in stuck in my head, and I just get more frustrated than I feel it is currently worth.

enderland

No worries

user15026

I appreciate how others are able to do the things, but it seems to require analytical thinking that I am just not able to figure out. Like I can understand stuff while Codecademy or whatever is holding my hand with very specific instructions (well, I can some of the time) but extrapolating that later as in what to use it with and stuff just I can't seem to follow that

user41796

@AshleyNunn comes from practice, so don't feel too badly about it

user15026

It's like I can mix paint colours to make secondary colours, but I can't go from there to figure out how to make the picture I want.

user41796

Today's candidate could tell me the Big O value for a function, but couldn't write that 4 or 5 line function by themselves.

user15026

6:11 PM

I get very easily frustrated and overwhelmed as well, it's hard to explain. Just my brain needs new input slowly over lots of time and you will probably have to tell me the thing more times than you like.

enderland

@AshleyNunn I focus teaching people the logic rather than any actual programming

user41796

and add in lots of practice. :-)

user15026

(incidently, this is why the lack of docs for my current job frustrates me because I have to ask people over and over instead of just being able to like check a knowledge base)

enderland

in my experience implementation details are not what people have difficulty learning but are what they focus on when learning - it's how to convert "do X" into concrete steps

the steps can be in word, in a flowchart, or whatever

but the hard part is knowing what steps/when, not how to actually implement them...

user15026

See, I can think oh like you need x and y but I don't know how to stick x and y together to make my goal.

user15026

6:13 PM

To me it's like a new Lego kit without the instructions.

user41796

I think that's one of the advantages of the project euler site in that it gives lots of opportunities to practice various constructs and then check against known values

user41796

Realizing that initial attempts will likely take longer than subsequent ones

enderland

@AshleyNunn you don't even need to start thinking about "x and y" though

the first step is describing in words what you want to happen

user15026

The thing I struggle with most is that I understand something while I work on it but if I walk away my brain is just like nope, forgotten

Ixrec

honestly, it feels like half of my job is talking people into breaking down what it is they really want until it's at the point where I can break it down into little pieces of code that makes the computer do stuff

@AshleyNunn Oh that's not just you. The whole reason we talk so much about "readable code" is that this is constantly happening to all of us; if the code isn't readable enough we can't figure it out again when we get back to it.

2

Respect My Authoritah

6:16 PM

Most of the time they don't even really know what they want, you have to kinda force the requirements out of them.

user15026

@enderland I van tell you what I want to do, but I don't know how to stick the programmer Lego together, even when I know the parts. Like when I was doing fizz buzz in JS I knew what each part had to do, I just didn't know how to snap the Lego together

user15026

Lego being programming bits. Functions or whatever

user41796

@AshleyNunn Did I mention more practice? :-D

Ixrec

I wonder if how that feels to you is anything like how I feel when I accidentally start reading about real math (like, topology and abstract algebra and other stuff I was never good enough for)

enderland

@AshleyNunn do you write it in lists? like:

1. I want to read in a value from the user
2. Then, I want to check if the value is greater than 5
3. When the value is greater than 5 I want to say "hello!"
4. If it is less than 5, I want to say "goodbye"

Ixrec

6:23 PM

I feel like every time I try this "say it in English" thing with "non-technical people", they usually manage to sneak around the goal of logical thinking by taking advantage of the ambiguity of English to say something that means "and then magic happens" but they don't realize it means that (usually by ambiguous usage of "it" or "the")

user15026

@enderland that's how I think of it, yeah.

Ixrec

there's a reason no programming language has "it" or "the" keywords

user15026

Articles are not important really, in communication in that sense

Respect My Authoritah

@Ixrec

Ixrec

hi

Respect My Authoritah

6:34 PM

sorry, stupid keyboard stopped working

I was gonna say, I wouldn't be sure that no language has these keywords, but I get the point.

Ixrec

I actually googled a few to see if I could find one

COBOL doesn't appear to have either

Respect My Authoritah

I find that with clients or a product owner, it's best to just present them with a viable solution and ask for their input.

Ixrec

oh yes, once you've gotten them to articulate the problem then absolutely throw out a prototype to iterate on

Thomas Owens

YAY! No Boston 2024.

Ixrec

but there usually has to be some upfront Q&A so you can at least tell what kind of problem you're being asked to solve

for some reason I find a lot of requests are initially made in a way that could be interpreted as either a very trivial thing or a very long and hard project, but usually the requester only had one or the other in mind

user41796

6:39 PM

@ThomasOwens That was for the Olympics, right?

Respect My Authoritah

Obligatory xkcd

Thomas Owens

@GlenH7 Yes. Waiting on an official statement from USOC. But it looks to be dead following the mayor saying he wouldn't sign a statement allowing taxpayers to eat the cost overruns.

user41796

That's awesome

Jimmy Hoffa

@Telastyn you see my answer regarding the Haskell alternative thing? I know the function I defined exists somewhere in Haskell - and can probably be derived without the Eq constraint, but for the life of me I can't think it up...

user41796

From what I can tell, the IOC's greed for graft and corruption has continued to grow at unprecedented rates.

Jimmy Hoffa

6:42 PM

I suspect some combinatoric trick of function application can give a more general implementation

Thomas Owens

In other news, a cow in the town where I work ran over a person and hurt him. They suffered a concussion.

enderland

Mooove out of the way?

durron597

@ThomasOwens hulu.com/watch/335183

Thomas Owens

Boston2024 may have been a good idea, if they weren't expecting taxpayers to pay the bills for overruns.

@durron597 Can't see it at work. What is it?

durron597

@ThomasOwens imdb.com/title/tt2176779/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Thomas Owens

6:45 PM

Heh.

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens :/ seriously, it sounds funny phrased the way you put it, but change it ever so slightly to "Bull tramples pedestrian" and suddenly it sounds terrifying, which is frankly what it is

Thomas Owens

@JimmyHoffa The title of the article was "Westford cow runs over person".

Not "Cow runs over Westford person" or "Cow tramples person in Westford".

Jimmy Hoffa

@ThomasOwens just goes to show how phrasing can change the interpretation so significantly. They mean the same thing

@Telastyn thoughts:

2

A: Is there a Haskell idiom for trying several functions and stop as soon as one succeeds?

Given a closed set (fixed number of elements) S with elements {a..z} and a binary operator *: There is a single identity element i such that: forall x in S: i * x = x = x * i The operator is associative such that: forall a, b, c in S: a * (b * c) = (a * b) * c You have a monoid. Now given a...

Telastyn

7:38 PM

@JimmyHoffa - sorry, was in meetings and then reading about the TCO bug

I must say, I don't know enough to comment.

durron597

8:06 PM

@enderland So how do you feel about this

enderland

Heh..

durron597

@enderland I campaigned repeatedly for Telastyn and gnat to run. The fact that they refused is probably why they would have made good mods.

Duga

Requests for recommendations of specific software are generally not accepted on StackOverflow; perhaps programmers.stackexchange.com would be a better place for this question. — oxguy3 49 secs ago

@oxguy3 nope. Software recommendations are explicitly offtopic at programmers.se as well. — MetaFight 55 secs ago

Hi @Duga!! (programmers.se) — MetaFight 55 secs ago

2

Jimmy Hoffa

@durron597 @gnat would make a great mod. Everyone knows this. The site would however suffer.

whatsisname

8:38 PM

i need more cashmoney

enderland

@whatsisname that was decidedly random

user41796

@durron597 gnat has gone on record before as to why he doesn't want a shiny diamond on his back. The TL;DR is that a diamond and its binding votes doesn't mesh well with his moderation style. He's very comfortable with putting a VTC on something marginal simply so the community can review and then agree or disagree.

durron597

8:57 PM

@GlenH7 Also he's a bot, that's probably part of it too.

user41796

That does certainly complicate things

whatsisname

looks like one of my comments in DIY was deleted for being inflammatory

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