I’ve always been curious as to what “normal” people think programming is like. The wildest theory I’ve heard is “typing ones and zeroes” (I’m a software engineer)
I guess you write a bunch of gibberish, press execute and hope something happens?
8 hours of meetings and 10 minutes of writing code.
Nailed it!
Actual programming is punished by your boss, the IP lawyer, and the customer.
Backup backup backup. If anything breaks rollback till it works again.
Implement machine learning for the business process. You can afford you one raspberry pi.
It involves a lot of tall girls in thigh high socks, sometimes they wear cat ears too. And they do a lot of typing on extra clackity keyboards.
Imagine a poorly lit room. The smell of coffee permeates every inch while the Baba is You soundtrack is played on repeat. Five to fifty monkeys sit in desks and attempt to bind whatever devils are necessary to invoke the magic their leader demands. sixty three percent of their effort is actually just browsing social media and posting memes in niche online communities, but they still manage to get stuff done.
I figure it’s like what I used to do in grade school to make the turtle draw shapes in Logowriter, on an Apple IIe.
And you say you’re not a programmer 🙄
I’m pretty sure most of these comments are written by programmers 🤣 reciting CSI stuff…
I’m not in IT and I’m a programmer / software engineer. I don’t get why people always equate the two.
IT ＝ Information Technology (= Computer Science)
When things get really tough, two of you will double up on the same keyboard.
1 in 6 have multiple personalities and substance abuse daemons.
Your bosses ride little skateboards everywhere, when they’re not busy programming animated singing viruses.
The FBI watches you code, but has no idea what they’re looking at.
A significant fraction of you can type with your feet, proficiently.
Saved for later – someone remind me to check back in on this in a day or two.
Hey, check back in on this in a day or two.
Sorry. I’m a dad. It had to be done. I’m not proud of myself
Playing with imaginary Legos to put together a rickety tower.
Edit: though on reflection, a systems approach to nursing the acutely ill is exactly the same but we’re maintaining “God’s” legacy code while we try to keep someone with kidney, heart, and lung problems functioning with judicious application of fluid management, drugs, and dialysis.
Maybe what we do is closer to Jenga.
Well, I’m not really the truly blind here, I used to do some BASIC back in the eighties. Just introductory level shit, though. I’m talking a course taken over a summer for “gifted” kids, not even an actual full on course at a serious level. And I wasn’t very good at it lol
But, I still have no clue what modern languages are like, or how they’re used professionally. I’ve always assumed, you guys are busy entering lines of code, then compiling and testing, then punching things because you have to go back and fuck
upwith the code again.I figure there may be ways to streamline the coding itself, maybe chunks of prefab that can be copy/pasted, or whatever.
Other than that, I suppose there’s lots of coffee, coke and/or meth, and a lot of waifu pillows.
Imagine this… line numbers are no longer a thing. 😆 Yeah I learned programming in the 80’s as well, the Sinclair ZX81 was my first computer. These days a large number of languages, both compiled and parsed, are based around C so it’s pretty easy to jump around a lot.
Okay, no line hikers numbers. But, how the hell are things carried out in order? Did numbering just get replaced by another system, or did it get thrown out as unnecessary to coding as a whole?
Yeah line numbers got thrown out as a whole. Code is still followed in sequential order, but instead of GOTO we now have functions that we call for reusable operations, and those functions can have parameters sent to them. So like you can set up a function that adds a line of text to a log file, then call the function with a variable containing that text. I honestly can’t remember if we had something like that in the early versions of BASIC. Overall I felt it made things a lot easier when line numbers were dropped, especially when you wanted to add more code in the middle of an existing block so you weren’t forced to renumber everything to make room.
I think the biggest change to wrap my head around was the elimination of the GOTO statement. This seemed like such a mistake at first, but it turns out that if you wrap things within conditional expressions (if-then and do-while are typical) then you really don’t need GOTO jumping all over the place and it tends to keep specific operations more self-contained which leads to the code being easier to read through.
If you want to see some examples of more modern code, take a look at something for PHP. This code felt most at home to me when I moved away from BASIC and is one of the few that still uses the $ symbol to denote variable names. Loops and conditionals are enclosed in {curly braces} so instead of the old
for i$=1 to 5:<code here>:nextloop you would see something likefor($i=1; $i<=5; $i++){<code here>}and you just add as many lines as you need in between them. This is where indenting your code became popular, because if you have a lot of nested conditionals/loops it’s easy to lose your place. The indents give you a reference of which code is part of which loops. Overall things have changed quite a bit, but at the core of it your code is still following a specific order to get things done.
