Programming as a career

i've only seen that one comment but a) wow at the inventiveness of people and b) fuck the inventiveness of people

you can use unicode letters (not punctuation) in java for variable names and i can see delta being useful for all the animations i write but fuck learning how to type it.

also, i think java 9 stopped the use of a single _ as a variable name, but two or more is fine.

the comments thing has come to a head again after they refused to approve a pull request because of comments and *whitespace* in a component test! apparently the blank lines made him think it was a new Scenario even given the indentation.

so now we have a team meeting about it, but it'll be the usual steam-rollering, the alpha programmer forcing his views on everybody by dint of talking the most.

*sigh*

hopefully sanity prevailed. at least pretty much everybody thought that not approving changes because of comments was unreasonable.

That's a good sign!

I hope I never again have to work anywhere that doesn’t have strict autoformatting procedures in place.

even though i have very strong formatting preferences, i've found the best way to deal with the issue is to use an opinionated, non-configurable formatter as part of the build process. that way, everyone dislikes the formatting equally

We have flake8 for our Python stuff but not black, autoformatting would make me cwazy

my preferences > autoformatters > everyone else's preferences

i absolutely loathe black, but it's still better than the alternative on a shared repo, so i've learned to live with it.

is there a thread for just like general CS news and stuff? this seems pretty cool:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-achieve-crown-jewel-of-cryptography-20201110/

my preferences > autoformatters > everyone else's preferences

cool link, brimstead!

Haha, yep, in our front-end JavaScript codebase Prettier is a godsend for being almost totally unconfigurable.

generate 84 files
commit to github
upload to server

repeat 40 times, changing one word each time.

(i have replaced step one with a sed script rather than manually editing the files but still...)

Why is programming language documentation so terrible? I mean, look at this shit:

https://www.cplusplus.com/reference/functional/function/

std::function

Class that can wrap any kind of callable element (such as functions and function objects) into a copyable object, and whose type depends solely on its call signature (and not on the callable element type itself). An object of a function class instantiation can wrap any of the following kinds of callable objects: a function, a function pointer, a pointer to member, or any kind of function object (i.e., an object whose class defines operator(), including closures). A decay copy of the wrapped callable object is stored internally by the object, which becomes the function's target. The specific type of this target callable object is not needed in order to instantiate the function wrapper class; only its call signature. The function object can be copied and moved around, and can be used to directly invoke the callable object with the specified call signature (see member operator()). function objects can also be in a state with no target callable object. In this case they are known as empty functions, and calling them throws a bad_function_call exception.

Not only is this incredibly complex for the novice reader to understand, but you will notice at no point in the entire article does it mention why you would ever want to use this or what problem does it solve.

I’m not going to defend that as a model of clear technical writing but that’s an api reference not a tutorial document.

not that this is in any way more clear, but cppreference.com is the site you want for non-spammy c++ documentation: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/functional/function

I do like the “Run this code” functionality so you can try it out yourself.

Novices should probably not be learning C++

I think c++ is probably not the reference point for this moment in programming education but as caek said, it’s the reference guide and not a learning one

pretty sure there are a few learning documents, books, guides, etc for this language but who can be sure

I do appreciate the literal nature of “I want to do c++” and literally going to cplusplus.com though

i definitely sympathize. man pages and documentation have always been written for those who already have a general understanding of programming terminology and fundamentals.

that aside, just from a writing point of view, documentation has also always been kind of terrible, but that's because it's difficult to draw the line when you need to explain all the concepts referenced. it's easier to pass this job over to the reader, so the reader/learner ends up having to google all the parts of the explanation that don't make sense in order to fill in the knowledge gaps.

having said that, i will say it actually does get easier, thankfully.

the c programming language book is still a pretty terrible book to use in an intro to c course (one of my first introductions to programming, regrettably so)

the best documentation i've seen recently (like in the past year or two) is microsoft's typescript stuff https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/ (i guess it's easy when you have a large FT staff writing docs), but honorable mention to https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/ which went off on tangents explaining background topics exactly when i personally had gaps in my knowledge (others may find it too discursive).

typescript is doing js a lot of good, imo

I recently realized that whenever I’m learning to use a language, software, or package and the docs or tutorials say “use <feature X> with care”, what they really mean is “never under any circumstances use this feature. It stinks.”

or “when you run into the edge case that really only works with <feature X> you’re not going to have a lot of fun”

Classic or dud, people who check for all kinds of edge cases except for the one that actually arises in practice

breaking stuff is fun

the c programming language book is still a pretty terrible book to use in an intro to c course (one of my first introductions to programming, regrettably so)

I read that book and afterwards felt that I understood C, but had no idea how to program anything in it.

what's the point in an expensive ticketing system if you're just going to ask poeple to do stuff or review stuff or give the nod for stuff on a slack channel? or, even worse, in zoom comments window (which disappears when the call ends)

also, json, all very well but if you're using it for config and one entry is a list of ip addresses with no context, that's not great. at least with xml you can add comments.

I’ve failed to do the jerk thing lately and respond to any request with a link to the relevant ticketing/help desk site

it’s a good habit but unnnngh sometimes it’s easy to just do the thing

arguably shouldn't the associated property name give you context for what those IP addresses are?

JSON for human-readable config files is bad and hated

I pasted two (2) direct emails this week into new tickets for people. Unfortunately I then immediately worked on one of them, like an idiot.

> arguably shouldn't the associated property name give you context for what those IP addresses are?

ipwhitelist01, ipwhitelist02...

okay lol, I give up

i complained about exactly that, and wrote the 5 lines of code that used a list of suffixes rather than a counter for the property names. but no...

https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/json-with-commas-comments.html is good

what's the point of writing tickets if they contain 1 useful bit of information, and 5 bits of misinformation?

channel_05 to 08 is actually channel_01 to 04

"pTO value should be adjusted appropriately." yeah, thanks for that.

the example file i'm to base everything on is for some test system that bears no relation to the target (actually, either of the two different targets, which is a pain in itself)

oh, and it needs doing for the end of the week.

is that a knock on qa?

i had an uncomfortable interaction once with someone because they thought that if you "keep it simple, it will be simple"

i told them i had one simple request for them to do on their tickets. the information they provided wasn't completely wrong, but half of it was based on a misunderstanding of how the code worked on the backend

was a task ticket. config needed generating and deploying so that things can flow through the system but, y'know, if the inputs i'm given are wrong AND the outputs i'm given are wrong then it's going to be all the harder.

(usually this configuration is 600 urls spread over 80 files. and there are ~30 sets of this. (i spent a bunch of time sorting out templates and scripts to generate this, which made helped) but these need a different (much smaller, thankfully) set of templates)

oh that sounds brutal. nothing like wasting time doing so much work for nothing

you know you're in trouble when the reference documents look like this

https://dashif.org/docs/DASH-IF-IOP-v4.2-clean.htm

wow. good luck, man. a related gripe i have about doing things that take a while is that the next person/middle management comes in and says how simple the solution was, because they're hardly aware of all the work it took to get there. everything seems simpler in retrospect.

tickets for system experts should be outcomes and not specific values imo

the problem is no one writing or (not in your case) reading tickets is an expert so it’s a shitshow

https://dashif.org/docs/DASH-IF-IOP-v4.2-clean.htm

LOL! we had a vendor come back to us today saying "the file you generated has a lowercase 'y' but it should be uppercase" ..and i flashed back to the discussion i had with my developers a month ago about how bizarre it was that it would be 'y' and 'N' but the docs clearly show a lowercase 'y'...

and then you're here* until 9:15 making sure all your ducks are in a row and the next morning the ducks prior to your ducks are nowhere to be seen, not a quack.

until, about 6:30 tonight when they'll start squawking, probably.

(* here being just sat on the sofa so no real hardship. and i did take an hour out to eat something and watch grand designs australia)

> the next person/middle management comes in and says how simple the solution was,

yeah, this. sometimes a ticket is only a 3 word change, but working out what those 3 words were, ruling out all the other words, and where they need to go can take a week. i do wonder how we managed before the internet.

career: team lead pushing to get us all promotions. but that entails writing 300 words each on things like "Flexibility" and "Influencing" and demonstrating same and that writing seems so far away from what i actually do, and i'm so terrible at it, that i really can't be bothered.

Buckle up and do it, it’s not like you’ll be held accountable to it, or pay someone to do it