Programming as a career

Please open a ticket

If the ticket management software is anything like the one I use at work, I'll have to make a second ticket when the ticket management software crashes when I try to make the first ticket.

What hub are you on?

Please send a screenshot to the following distribution list: sixfootmeneh✧✧✧@vax✧✧✧.c✧✧

Would it be cromulent to ask an intern candidate to differentiate a function that I need for work because they list calculus as a concentration?

Is that something they'd probably need to do on the job?

they opened the door

Not normally! It's just that I'm working on a feature that requires equations that algebra can't solve, and I like human feedback to complement what Wolfram Alpha has given me.

I want, not I like.

Is SQL knowledge among developers something that's on its way out? And I don't mean DBA-level knowledge, just simple familiarity with basic selects, joins, etc.

It's all about the nosql now, I fear.

Probably, which is dumb, because databases are good, and it’s possible to use them in smart ways, but only if you know SQL, and nobody has designed a language other than SQL for RDBMSes that can actually use all their features efficiently as far as I know.

idk how common this is but where I work each team has its own database person. not that we really get any special privileges but we do get to optimize stupidly complex queries and run endless scans for marketing people

I certainly haven't used sql in 5 years.

Database layers in code always used to be a faff, as was waiting for the DBA to write you a stored procedure to do what you needed.

That said, getting errors at 9am every morning because you've gone over your opaque iops limit in an aws hosted dB somewhere gets old quickly too.

(first job I had involved the sql-based Informix report generator language and I used to love crafting those reports)

i just used an sql query the other day!

it reeeeally depends on what you're doing

persistence and mapping frameworks are good enough now that, unless it's really high traffic or a very complex table structure, it's a good idea to *not* write your own queries

I think the new status quo is fine because developers wrote too much bad sql

I wrote a few queries the last few weeks but they're being used in a data transfer tool

btw I'm all in favor of Apache NiFi now, as long as it's used intelligently. nice software!

The trouble is using ORMs exclusively will not teach you how to design a database well, and depending on the ORM can teach you actively bad ways of using a database.

oh, for sure. someone else should be designing your database, but the majority of the people actually writing software to hit the database, no prob

do NOT do the code-first, auto-generate the database path if it's going to be hit by more than one application. a particularly bull-headed jerk of a former coworker apparently was the software architect for a piece of software where he did exactly that and he completely fucked the project and I think people realized he wasn't as good as he liked to claim. dude should not have been designing anything used by more than a couple people imo

"Payment amount
£54.2400"

dunno who's doing the QA at (large electricity provider)'s website but they need to be better than they are.

had an hungarian tester once who did a report which contained a *mix* of european format numbers and english numbers. wasn't even consistent within the same one page email, really confusing. ie:

25,456 = 25 thousand 4 hundred and fifty six in english, 25 and 456 thousandths in hungarian

4.294 = 4 thousand 2 hundred and 94 in hungarian, 4 and 294 thousandths in english.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/index.html

While not a “programmer” I love SQL - so simple, so elegant

Me too! I love that its grammar is so much closer to natural (english) language than anything else I've worked with. It's intuitive! More so for "verbal" people than "quantitative" people, I think, if that's a real distinction

It’s a language for writers

y'all would love COBOL then :)

I agree that SQL is intuitive and expressive for a large range of problems. Unfortunately it also leads developers to put a lot of business logic in the database which is kind of an anti-pattern.

It never ceases to amaze me how much “mission critical” shit is written in toy languages designed to be intentionally “dumber” than Real Computer Scientist code

lol dan have you tried a little language called ~applescript~

SQL itself is adequate, it’s relational databases that are truly a great invention

On the other end of the (in)comprehensibility spectrum, I find myself forced to trial-and-error my way through a regex thing (program? query?) today and wow, I fucking hate this. This kind of Perl-like bullshit needs to die forever

(I know, it's "powerful" or whatever, but as a human being--*barf*)

Oh I see, Perl descended from regex. That makes sense

perl is ludicrous but with regex I'm grateful to not have to write 50+ lines of complicated loops just to do a search and replace.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Perl-induced madness.

SQL is fun. But it’s when dealing with massive amounts of data that things get frustrating. Large amounts of data is rarely organized in a way that allows you to write “elegant” SQL, unfortunately.

perl is the most wonderful language i ever learned and you are all monsters

xp yeah but it isn't really made for that, I'm a 'write a readable query and parse the data in Java' sorta guy

lately I've had to write a lot of queries involving aggregates and subsets its frustrating because I get into a lot of situations where it's like..."ok I can do this and this and that, but I can't figure out how to do ALL of it together, even though I'm 90% sure there's a way to do it"

I fall into the trap of trying to craft a single query to do some complex things that are probably better left as multiple queries, but I also use Rails which makes that kind of data manipulation much easier.

Crafting a single query to do a complex thing is fun as hell to me now, I love doing it. Sometimes I give up and cheat with a temp table :(

ive a fella from dundaaàwk ahint me at work tackling some new code or something and he has taken to yeowling "och ye know wharray fucking meant ye tick baawstird" at his screen oh maybe ten times an hour

SQL rules

I’ve been playing around a lot in R recently. I like that it’s more of a really powerful calculator than a programming language.

Regex'es are painful to work with, no doubt, but there's often not a simpler alternative to accomplish what you can do with them. Actually one thing that I don't like about SQL (despite it's being mostly awesome) is the lack of regexes.

SQL wuz here ‘19

I’m a bad person who does SQL irregularly and rather than remember how to do a partition statement the other week, I once again wrote a query in LinqPad and had it generate a query for me

It never ceases to amaze me how much “mission critical” shit is written in toy languages designed to be intentionally “dumber” than Real Computer Scientist code

― El Tomboto, Friday, July 12, 2019 2:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I’ve known a few people who worked on code for fighter jet stuff and it was all, by regulation, done in Ada. I think it’s less dumb than incredibly explicit and lacking abstractions that would make fuck-ups easier

Apparently the rules have changed and the F-35 has been programmed in C++, which makes sense considering how much of a boondoggle that entire project is

Yeah I heard ADA is used in aeronautics and shit because it’s really really hard to fuck up (there’s a word in programming language concepts for this, extra safe or something )

seeing some dumb fite on Twitter about '10x engineers' with no idea what means

developers' inability to use SQL these days does get a bit infuriating sometimes.

my colleague added a page to the CMS just to add values to a lookup table the other day then deleted the page when he was done, because he can't write an INSERT statement. but he is completely hopeless and hopefully will get fired soon

I'm not sure why SQL doesn't support regex out of the box really. it's completely trivial to add it to SQL Server with a C# CLR function, so why they don't just include it as standard I don't know. I think Postgres might support them?