What's WPF?

Windows Presentation Foundation. It's a desktop UI library for Windows that uses XAML to describe UIs. The XAML gets compiled to C#.

I'm learning JavaScript now and some things it does would sound crazy in Java land. I really like how flexible/versatile JavaScript is compared to Java

Java seems so rigid in comparison to JavaScript

Sounds cool and complex

I dislike JS because it's too flexible. I can make mistakes in it that C# would detect when I compile it.

And a good IDE will tell me about even as I type it...

How do you suggest I get up to speed on HTML and CSS by monday and during my first week of working as a developer?

W3 schools

@MyWrathAcademia ^^^^

Write a basic HTML webpage. W3 Schools is good for examples.

www.w3schools.com

w3schools.com/html/default.asp

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica thanks but the sub reddit for JavaScript always recommends avoiding W3 schools.

W3schools is great for basics

@MyWrathAcademia See, that's a long story.

@MyWrathAcademia it's good for basics, just not more advanced concepts.

See w3fools.com

@MyWrathAcademia what @Hosch250 said

Long story, W3 Schools used to have terrible, downright wrong, advice.

People complained and there was an absolute riot on the web.

Then they listened and cleaned their site up.

That W3 Fools site used to have a huge list of why not to use W3 Schools.

The first time I was linked to it was right after they changed it. And someone pointed the change out, and the person was like "Oh, OK. That's new."

@Hosch250 funny link. So in the past W3schools was bad but now they are better

@MyWrathAcademia yes, it's amazing what a little public humiliation can do

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica @Hosch250 do you know what date W3schools fixed all their problems?

Roughly even?

Maybe 5 years ago?

I've been working for nearly 3, and I was still in college when that happened.

Oh wow, and still the bad reputation still lingers on

The internet never forgets

I've seen people trying to get in flamewars over the old MS is EVIL stuff from their EEE policies.

People who pulled their code off GitHub when MS bought them.

haha that's an overreaction luckily they have bitbucket and gitlab

@MyWrathAcademia yep, reps last a long time, especially bad ones. This is why so many of us went nuts at the current state of SE

I was cautious when MS bought github but so far so good

@MyWrathAcademia Same. I'm prepared for them to go bad again at some point, but Nadella has been a good CEO, and I'm not really concerned under his watch.

@MyWrathAcademia MS has long ago lost their iron grip on the industry. Google and apple are eating their lunch

SE? You mean Stack Exchange?

What is wrong with the current state of Stack Exchange?

Another long story. There's been fights all over meta and over half the mods have quit.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica Amazon too

There are many attempts to build alternative QA sites for the non-SO sites to move to.

@Hosch250 I'm hearing about this for the first time.

What is meta?

And what are the mods fighting about?

You wouldn't see it unless you were active on meta or the chatrooms.

Each SE site has a meta site for personal business. like meta.workplace.stackexchange.com.

And there is a main meta site for the entire thing, meta.stackexchange.com

There have been a lot of little things and a couple big ones.

The first one is they forced-relicensed everything to CC-by-SA 4.0 instead of 3.0.

They can't do that because they don't own the content. They just have a license to it. It's, from all reports, on its way to the courts.

Stack overflow are the ones who changed the licence?

Yes. They retro-actively gave themselves a different license on the content we'd licensed to them.

The other thing is some minority groups felt they were being marginalized, and SE wasn't doing anything to enforce the "be nice" rule. So one mod (minority themselves) rage-quit over that. SE finally took notice posted a proposal to tighten up the be nice rule.

I think this:

It was still in the proposal stage, and one mod pointed out a flaw in it. Specifically, the issue was people weren't using the pronouns they wanted, and she said "As a professional technical writer, I don't use pronouns; how does that affect me? Also, what is the expected action if someone doesn't follow this rule?"

Is very important. Despite reddit being useful to me I don't like using it because too many users have the same mindset you find on youtube comments

Instead of discussing the issue, SE promptly fired the mod (Monica).

A wave of mods resigned in protest. Over the next few weeks, she tried to talk with them, but they wouldn't talk to her and slandered her to the press.

Wow this is really bad.

She sued them, they settled out of court a while later. Throughout the process, several more waves of mods resigned as they realized SE didn't care about the communities anymore.

Several SE sites don't have any mods left or are struggling with just a single mod.

This is a good reason to build alternative Q&A sites but the problem is that the user base probabky won't migrate

The latest round was when they fired 2 longtime employees (Shog9 and Robert Cartaino).

A third had been looking for a job for a period of time and quit a couple days later (Jon Ericson).

Stackoverflow sound like assholes

From the sounds of it, a number of other trusted employees are also looking for jobs, but they haven't said outright because it's hard for community managers to find jobs.

I've always thought that out of all the StackExchange websites I visit stackoverflow has always been the unfriendliest to a new programmer

That was part of what triggered these changes. People kept complaining about that.

Personally, though, I'm kind of mixed on that.

I thought that too, when I was starting. I even got myself banned for posting bad content.

yeah I had just started learning programming and quickly got turned off stackoverflow because users were so harsh and not welcoming

But now, I realize I was asking bad questions. I wasn't meeting the quality of question the site wanted, and I wasn't using it the way it was intended to be used.

I kept asking for explanations of my code and stuff. SO isn't (or wasn't) about that.

@MyWrathAcademia I never talked about my sexuality here, and got tired of all the accusations, so it caused me to out myself, to show the lie to all the accusations of homophobia

Yeah, stackoverflow is supposed to be more of a repository of questions and answers

SO was about being a big collection of data on how to fix specific errors.

@Hosch250 yeah. but they should have sent you to "code review" rather than beat you up.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica Code review didn't exist then.

This was 8 years ago, or so.

And they only take working code anyway.

@Hosch250 Ah, sorry.

Still, they're known for being rude....

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica I see, you outed yourself to prove that homophobia is not a problem on Stack Exchange?

@MyWrathAcademia Well, that it was being blown out of proportion, and they were accusing me of being homophobic, simply because I disagreed with their nonsense

SO was never meant to be "my code doesn't work." They are meant to be "my code gives me a specific error when I do this". And people can say "don't do that, do that" and "this is why, change this".

Instead of explaining line by line why my specific code doesn't work. They were like "I see you haven't bothered to read the docs."

@Hosch250 yeah, but that isn't readily apparent to someone stumbling in.

Which, granted, is ruder than it needs to be.

@Hosch250 or..... RTFM

which is worse

But again, from their perspective from seeing this all day--that's what it was.

They'd lost perspective on the beginning stages because they'd been good programmers for so long.

@Hosch250 I've modded some sites myself in the past, the 99th person asking the question you've heard 98 times before is still only asking it for the first time

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica Yep. But it really does get old. I've quit forums over that problem before.

That's where SE excels with the close-as-duplicate.

@Hosch250 an old fart like me predates the interwebs.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica understood. I hope people on stack exchange are reasonable enough to respect other peoples beliefs or sexuality

@Hosch250 which Stack Exchange site was Monica a mod of?

Is it askUbuntu?

I've yet to see a good site where people can walk new beginners through learning programming. SE chats are often pretty good about it, although some are experts-only (which is only fair--they need some expert-only room too).

@MyWrathAcademia that's just it, it never WAS a problem. People just started complaining. How does being LGBTQ+ affect your code? People weren't being attacked

@MyWrathAcademia There were 6. I don't remember.

Worldbuilding and Writing were 2, I think.

Anyway, TTQW.

@Hosch250 Tech Republic was good at it, but then they got bought by CBS, who promptly ruined it, much the same was as SE has been

Monica was a mod in here as well, one of the few on SE that I respected

Seems like a big loss. Always a shame when nice people get treated badly

@MyWrathAcademia and monica is the nicest of the nice.

Which is why so many of us got so mad

@Hosch250 @RichardSaysReinstateMonica Great conversion but its very late here (I think your'e UK based RichardSaysReinstateMonica so you know this) . I'm sad to leave but I should have left over an hour ago. We'll continue our chat another day!

Wait Monica is in your name?

Just noticed

@MyWrathAcademia No, I changed it in protest

IT's "Richard says 'Reinstate Monica"

I mean yes, sorry

Nice.

A bunch of us put something to that effect in when they ditched her.

See you all later

Well, don't stay up to late. See you tomorrow

:)