• @lobut@lemmy.ca
    9•1 month ago

    I started with C++ and went to Java to .NET to Javascript and now to Terraform.

    I know this is all a joke but there’s something definitely different with the ones above and the ones below. There’s a bit of satisfaction you can get sometimes when you’re working with memory directly and getting faster feedback (yes, there’s more math back then and it wasn’t easy to look stuff up, for sure). However, there’s new challenges nowadays … there’s so many layers on top of layers. I feel as though Stack Overflow and ChatGPT are so needed because the error messages and things we give are obfuscated or unclear (not always any library author’s fault as there’s compatibility issues, etc)

    We’re doing serverless stuff at my current company and none of our devs run code locally. They have to upload it using CDK or Serverless Framework to run on the cloud. We don’t use SST so we can’t set breakpoints but like that’s a lot of crap inbetween just running your code already. Not even getting into the libraries and transpilers and stuff we use. I spent like a few weeks over Christmas to get our devs to run the code locally. Guess what? None of them use it because they’re so use to uploading it. I was like, "you can put breakpoints in it! you can have nodemon and it instant reloads! nope, none of them care … "

      • @andioop@programming.devEnglish
        2•1 month ago

        First learning is last learning.

        I’ll be the dumb one to ask: what do you mean? Is this that making a mistake that costs a lot is the best teacher, because you only have to mess it up once to learn it forever?

        • @Arcane2077@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4•1 month ago

          Pretty sure they mean people don’t learn something again when they already learned it. Once you learn how to do something, willingness to learn it again but a different way dries up, and so you stick to bad habits as long as they ‘work’

        • @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
          2•1 month ago

          It’s a mantra about teaching people and then expecting them to forget it. Doesn’t work. They’ll default to what they already know.

          My freshman English teacher got married in October and I called her by her maiden name the entire year.

          Like all programming mantras, it’s not universally true, but it’s annoyingly reliable. It reflects the shape of the human brain.

    • @Rin@lemm.ee
      4•1 month ago
      .parent {
    display: grid;
    place-items: center;
}

      couldn’t be easier in 2025.

      • @PoPoP@lemm.ee
        2•1 month ago

        probably a lot less performant than doing it the old fashioned way. sometimes that matters. you should have the non-grid non-flex method half committed to memory. abusing flex or grid to save 2 lines of code is not a great practice, and having only one child element is usually a pretty clear sign that flex/grid is the wrong tool for the job

        at the end of the day though do whatever you want, in fact why not just write a javascript function to recenter it every frame at 60fps cause 99.9% of the software 99.9% of people interact with is pure shit made by developers who don’t care for users who don’t care.

        we live in a slop world, made by and for slop people who love slop. can you tell i’ve been awake for 30 hours? anyways…

  • @jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
    29•1 month ago

    QA: “Yeah, Hi. Can you look at this defect ticket?”

    Reading ticket details…

    Me: “Let me guess. Is [whatshisname] responsible for this?”

    QA: “Yeah.”

    Me: “Get him to fix it.”

    QA: “I tried. Like four times.”

    Me: Sigh “I’ll take care of it.”

    QA: “Thank you!”

  • I Cast Fist
    25•1 month ago

    80s programmers hated Unix, btw. Look up Unix Haters Handbook, it’s a free and funny read

    • @frezik@midwest.social
      2•1 month ago

      A lot of it was fair criticism at the time. Linux fixed some of what was wrong. Having a good sudo config mostly resolves the problem of having one superuser account, and big, multiuser systems are a lot less common now, anyway. X’s network transparency features aren’t that useful in modern computing contexts, either, though I have found a few over the years.

      But mostly, it’s because the landscape changed from a hundred Unix vendors vs a bunch of other OSen, to now where it’s Windows vs Linux vs OSX. By that comparison, the two with Unix-derived history look well thought out.

      (This also implies that NextStep was the one old Unix vendor that has survived in a meaningful way. I don’t think anyone would have guessed that 30 years ago.)

      • @Prime_Minister_Keyes@lemm.eeEnglish
        2•1 month ago

        Thanks. I didn’t know there was a real band called “The Pipi Pickers” and I might have lived on happily without that knowledge.

  • Lemminary
    21•1 month ago

    Hey buddy, if I fix one bug and cause three more, it’s called job security. Where’s my medal?

  • @arudesalad@sh.itjust.works
    36•1 month ago

    One of my favourite game dev stories from the 1980s is the story of Elite. It was a game people thought couldn’t be made. Most devs thought hardware wasn’t powerful enough and publishers thought it wouldn’t be fun enough.

    It was one of the first properly 3D open world video games ever made. I think when it released it sold nearly as many copies as there were home computers that could run it.

    In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

    There’s a fantastic video about it here: https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I

    • @Redkey@programming.dev
      9•1 month ago

      In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

      Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer’s memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.

    • Lemminary
      8•1 month ago

      the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape

      Holy hell, that is OLD old. We’re talking about the beginnings of digital time here. Had the first web constellations formed yet? How fast did you crank your CPU?

      • @Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
        3•1 month ago

        Yeah, I played it a lot, and a similar one called aviator which was a kinda flight sim. There wasn’t really much of an internet back then but stuff was easy to copy on tapes.

    • candyman337
      2•1 month ago

      Elite Dangerous is the most recent installment of the series started by that game

  • @milkisklim@lemm.ee
    46•1 month ago

    Hey now. Searching stack overflow circia 2011 to 2018 was an Art. You had to know enough to find the correct question that wasn’t deleted because a mod thought it was a duplicate of another question

    • @kautau@lemmy.world
      15•1 month ago

      Also to find the actual correct answer three comments down because the one that was voted highest worked, but was actually a really shit way to do the thing being asked

    • @Valmond@lemmy.world
      2•1 month ago

      Before that you had to hang out on flipside or other gamedev sites and show your worthiness before begging for information.

      I was so proud when they shared the DS hack (basically a homebrew SDK made by trial and error by some people) so that I could make small games on it.

    • @wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
      4•1 month ago

      After a while you got know which stack overflow questions were a waste of time, and you used that knowledge for years.

    • Lemminary
      3•1 month ago

      I swore up & down that I’d learn at least two ways of exiting VIM. I even went through basic training to learn all the shortcuts, but it interfered with my regular workflow, so I dropped it “for a bit”. It’s been a year and I can’t remember a damn thing.

  • @boonhet@lemm.ee
    16•1 month ago

    The fact that the div center search needs a year on it got me lol

    Loving my nearly frontend free development life. I use Stackoverflow or Google maybe 2-3 times a month these days, not sure if I qualify for the upper row :(

    • @ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
      6•1 month ago

      I can exit Vim, it just feels like trying to rip out the dashboard and the interiors from a family car because race cars also lack them. Kate is a good speedy alternative to VSCode, not to mention it also does not have Microsoft’s greedy hands on it.

        • @toddestan@lemm.ee
          1•1 month ago

          Out of the box, Vim’s default configuration is very basic as it’s trying to emulate vi as close as possible. It like if you want things like headlights or a heater or a tachometer in your family car, you got to create a vimrc and turn those features on. That was my experience when I first started using Vim - I spent a lot of time messing around creating a vimrc until I got things the way I wanted.

          One of the big changes with Neovim is their default settings are a lot more like what you would expect in a modern text editor.

    • @state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3•1 month ago

      I first tried vi in the early 90s, before I had easy access to online resources. I had to open a new shell and kill the vi process to exit it. Next time I dialed into my usual BBS I asked how to exit that thing. But since then I’ve liked it, because vi has been on every system I ever ssh’ed into.

      • @barsoap@lemm.ee
        2•1 month ago

        You quit it just like you quit ed or ex, just that you have to enter the prompt (:) yourself as vi is not by default in prompt mode. And you should know ed, ed is the standard editor.

        I use Helix btw.