Boolean Logic....

Saw this a while back and decided to take a picture of it. Now I'm glad I did. XD

The same goes for clients.

Me trying to find a good risotto recipe.
Sister-in-law, PhD: What about pumpkin or courgette and salmon?
Me: ...
SIL: ...
Me: Could you add some parentheses?
SIL: (Pumpkin) or (courgette and salmon)?
Me: Much clearer, thanks! Go for courgette and salmon.

Boolean logic

One of the morons said today that we should use C because you don't need to "apply logic" in Python. Everything is automated in python. Fucking morons............

It doesn't ends here. One of the "9 pointers gang" student raised an objection. I was happy untill he said that there is no boolean datatype in C. I literally shouted "Shut up, morons. There is a whole fucking library dedicated to it." in a class of 60 students.

Don't know how I survived 3 years here. And more importantly, don't know how will I survive my next year.

P.S.: the 9 pointer guy who raised the objection, once asked me whether chrome is developed and maintained by Google?

confused screaming!!

An application based on a single MySQL stored procedure that contained all the application business logic inside of it (plus a poor webapp that simply called it). The stored procedure had 97 (yes, NINETY SEVEN) parameters... and about half of them were boolean flag used for enabling/disabling another parameter. I think that Uncle Bob could follow you holding an AK-47 if he saw that. The saddest part is that the shit was written by a guy having a PhD in computer science, and he knew that was bad, but the boss asked him to do it in that way. The guy left the company before I joined it and I had to maintain that crap. Guys, the first time I saw it I thought that should be a joke. Code generated by decompilers was easier to read, maybe even Brainfuck. I tried complaining with the boss but she said that the system was wonderful and very efficient. This was one of the reasons I moved to another company after some months.

Confession:

I rely on WolframAlpha to simplify Boolean logic a little too much.

George Boole was a truly great man

You will know your 2 year old dev team is messed up when the 'best programmer of the bunch' does a line like:

boolean check = ...some logic...;
if(check == true) {...

:/ and I'm going to be leading this team..

The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit!

When someone writes this
if(condition == true) {
//...
}

Using circuit simulator (can find it on itch.io) and recently built an 8bit adder as you can see below.

Pins on left are IN and pins on right are OUT.

Just wanted to run it by some of you because 1. circuit simulator is fucking cool, 2. I'm not sure if I got the basics correct.

I attached an imagine of the 8bit adder along with the subcircuits if that interests you.

From NAND to Tetris..

This book is IMO the best book for those who want to venture to the lower level programming.

This books retrains you’re thinking, teaches you from the bottom up! Not the typical top down approach.

You begin with the idea of Boolean algebra. And the move on to logic gates.. from there you build in VHDL everything you will use later.

Essentially building your own “virtual machine”.. you design the instruction set. Of which you will then write assembly using the instruction set to control the gate you built in VDHL.

THEN you will continue up the abstraction layer and will learn how a compiler works, and then begin written c code that is then compiled down to your assembly of your instructions set to be linked and ran on your virtual machine you built.

All the compiler and other tools are available on the books website. The book is not a book where you copy and paste, run and done.... you kinda have to take the concepts and apply them with this book.

Then once you master this book, take it the extra step and learn more about compilers and write your own compiler with the dragon book or something.

Fantastic book, great philosophy on teaching software.. ground up rather than top down. Love it! It’s Unique book.

Anyone else developed a habit to structure verbal allday Argumentations in your head in Code syntax? Helps me alot to follow ones logic. Except when I'm arguing with my girlfriend. Sometimes setMood(angry) gets randomly called (bug?) and then every if statement seems to be valid, eventhough it should return false. An inputstream that contains my outputstream is initialized but .readLine() is never being called. Instead, the outputstream to my inputstream is being overly abused. Once we get dive deeper into our if-statement we will find a while loop with a mysterious flag. Noone knows it's origin. The while loop keeps printing out random concatenated strings until it overflows your own capacity. I would have said its while(true) but in fact there must be a timer in another very hidden thread or something that sets our flag to false. The other and only way I know to exit that loop is to call apology() 100 times (maybe a variable sets the boolean that could be deeply buried in her projectstructure like this CONST.VALUES.getMood().getRealMood().getTrueMood().TRUTHCONTAINER.angryMode=true)..
I wish I could get a stressball so I can continue theorycrafting and debugging. Its 4.30 am now, my better side is snoozing next to me. I bet making this a pseudocode would be fun.

Ps: I love my lady but I had to rent

Could this be true?

TFW you’ve been trying to debug an issue for over an hour and you find out you typed:

variable1 == variable2

Instead of

variable1 = variable2

AARRGGHHHHJJHHHHHRIFNRIDKEJXJDJ!!!!!!!

So we had a class that should have 2 states 0 or 1, you think my coworker would be smart enough to represent it with a Boolean? NO!

Represent the state inside the object as an int then when using the object in a function creates a Boolean that determines the state of the object and after the function done it's job THEN call another function that takes the object and the Boolean and change the int state inside the object depending on the Boolean.

Wouldn't it have been whole lot easier to just you know..... Make the state a Boolean from the start.

When I saw this I knew I was witnessing a miracle of the human mind. God bless!

Ps: it wasn't connected to any kind of API nor server and there are never more than 2 states. It's just some local sequential code so don't assume it had a logical reason it's just a fuck up.

You can always tell if someone is a programmer by asking them:

Is zero equal to zero or equal to 1?

Non devs say 0, devs say 1

I've been a programmer for almost 19 years but I actually think the best code I've ever written is something that while it provides value to other people I'm the only one who actually uses it. In the company where I work we have major events that have to be supported by a number of different teams across about 5 time zones and each engineer has a limited set of roles that they can perform during the event. Anyway it was painful just watching people trying to create a schedule so I wrote something with Linear Programming to automatically generate the schedule. It ensures that people don't work for longer than 4 hours in a row, don't work from more than 8 hours from the first hour to the last hour on call, get 12 hours rest between engagements and the work load is evenly distributed across the team. Creating conditions in Linear Programming is weird, imagine trying to turn a series of linear equations into boolean logic, it can be done and once you can wrap your head around it it's really fun. It was my first time writing anything in it and I don't see it coming up a lot in my career. My favourite part of this project is that the end result was that engineers were less exhausted. I really hope that doesn't remain the best code I ever wrote, I don't think it will but it will require a conscious intention.

XOR...

I’m all for writing boolean statements that are readable, quick to grasp the real life case they’re representing and align with the spec rather than being ultra-reduced, but sometimes the spec is written by someone who clearly can’t reduce logic. So when the spec says “if it’s not the case that any of them are false” and you write:
!(!a || !b || !c || !d)
then I think you should try harder. At least put a note against the spec to say “i.e. if they’re all true” and then write the sensible code. Just think of the poor developer that might have to augment your code at a later date and has to follow and intercept that shite.

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

Should I be excited or concerned?

Newbie dev(babydev) who just learned string vs int and the word "boolean", is SUPER into data parsing, extrapolation and recursion... without knowing what any of those terms.

2 ½ hrs later. still nothing... assuming he was confused, I set up a 'quick' call...near 3 hrs later I think he got that it was only meant so I could see if/where he didnt understand... not dive into building extensive data arch... hopefully.

So, we need some basic af PHP forms for some public-provided input into a mySQL db. I figured I'd have him look up mySQL variables/fields, teach him a bit about proper db/field setup and give him something to practice on his currently untouched linux container I just set up so he could have a static ipv4 and cli on our new block (yea... he's spoiled, but has no clue).

I asked him to list some traits of X that he thinks could be relevant. Then to essentially briefly explain the logic to deciding/returning the values/how to store in the db... essentially basic conditionals and for loops... which is also quite new to him.

I love databases; I know I'm not in the majority... I assumed he'd get a couple traits in his mind and exhaust himself breaking them down. I was wrong. He was/likely is in his sleep now, over complicating something that was just meant as a basic af.

Fyi, the company is currently weighted towards more autistics (him and myself included) than neurotypicals.

I know I was(still am) extremely abnormal, especially when it comes to things like data.

So, should I be concerned/have him focus elsewhere for a bit?... I dont want to have him burnout before he even gets to installing mySQL

Today I learned that for boolean HTML attributes, they are considered true if they're present on the element at all, regardless of their value. And that as a rule, you should specify the empty string("") in value.

This wounds me on a logic level since everywhere else in JS, "" is false.

What.

The.

Fuck.

Seriously. Why?

There should be a new boolean called "Not sure". I wonder how much it can change the logic of every language.

!rant

Going through my graduate program I have come to realize that there is more to A.I than just machine learning algorithms. As if ML was not complicated enough, we add more to it such as KRR and other topics that border on the areas of Cognitive Science, Boolean Algebra, Logic and even Philosophy and you know what? I dig it. I dig it because finding some of the information in the course that I am getting is damn near impossible to see in other items. Such is the case as a method for fucking signature unit propagation which afuckingparently was developed by one of my instructors(not complaining, just really fucking impressed)

The thing is, most of these items would normally have a parallel in software development that we use on our day to day basis, all of us, no matter if you do web, systems development, database development whatever, the general concepts are the same: you represent real world concepts, such as that of logic and knowledge in programatic/mathematical representations.

I am really amazed at the content of these items, I really am. I just wish for some clarification on ambiguity, seems like most things are left better if it where explained in a programmer's point of view. Most of the items that I have seen could have easily been summarized in a programmers logic if only they would have preferred to take the time to do it, and I get that there needs to be mathematical intuition formulated before anything, it is better sometimes to learn concepts from an outside point of view, a mathematical point of view, but shit is just strange sometimes.

Benefits of using Strings for Boolean intended logic?

I'll go first

easily implement cases before finally checking if true

generateUsername: { type: String }

if(generateUsername == 'humanReadable'){
// generate a username in a human readable format AKA yoDudeImRainbow
} else if(generateUsername == 'hash'){
// generate a username by using a random hash
} else if(generateUsername){
// generate a username by using a random hash
}

Here’s a snippet of code that I found in our production codebase. I found this while fixing a bug. This is not part of the bug though but I see this a problem. Should I say this to my senior that his logic is off here?

First he doesnt have to do explicitly strict comparison since the return type is boolean and it could be true or false. Also the returnUrl will alway be undefined because redirectIfUserLoggedIn is called first before it was set.

He dosent like me. Hell get mad for sure. I think ill let this go.

value is some boolean variable

if( !(value != false) == true) {
return !value;
}

For the first time in 20 years I used and xor operator.
I wrote in line of code instead of two.

How uses the xor operator?

How do you deal with relatively complex Boolean logic requirements?

Here's a simple example, of which I missed 50% of the cases because it was non-intuitive to me:

A year is a leap year if:
- it is divisible by 4
- except it is also divisible by 100
- unless it is also divisible by 400

To my intuition, the logic tree is as follows:

if (year % 4 == 0) -> true
if (year % 100 == 0) -> false
if (year % 400 == 0) -> true

so I ended up with 3 cases and I initially missed all the others until I started coding.

The full solution is:

if(year % 4 === 0) {
if(year % 100 === 0) {
if(year % 400 === 0) {
true
} else {
false
}
false
} else {
true
}
true
} else {
false
}
}

I don't like it when I don't immediately see all logic paths.

The worst thing about a booleans is that you are right for just a bit , no room for error

Okay I always found these js weirdnesses that you see in memes more or less logical if you think about it, but so far I could not find any logic behind this:

true&&undefined
>undefined

false&&undefined
>false

can anyone explain wtf they thought about there? undefined is falsy so why not just convert it to boolean implicitly!

If a lie detector outputs true was the input a lie or the truth?

Why did the pirate learn boolean logic?

So he could "arr" and "arr" without getting confused between true and false :)