Most hated language features?

PL/SQL:
• it exists

XSLT:
• it also exists

PHP:
• it still exists.

VB:
• Significant parentheses: `subName` calls the subroutine, and `subName()` calls the subroutine and gets a return value. If you use the wrong invocation, it yells at you. Why!?
• For reasons unknown, you can only have `sleep` appear once per codebase. (So put it in a function!)

Ruby:
• It’s bloody easy to write code with absolute shit performance, and it kind of feels encouraged because of just how easy Ruby makes everything. Less critical thinking means worse performance, and Ruby’s blissful elegance encourages mental laziness.
• Minor: You cannot pass a hash as the first method parameter without enclosing it in parentheses, ex:`method({key: value})`. This is due to the ambiguous case between passing a hash argument and a (curly) block/proc (`method {|args| code}`). This could be remedied pretty easily with a little bit of look ahead.
• Minor: There is no `elsif` for `unless` (a negated if). Why? No reason given.

Python:
• no block endings, so nested code can be extremely difficult to follow.

Bash:
• The freaking syntax oh god why.

All languages:
• rand vs rand() vs Rand vs Rand() vs rnd vs RND vs random() vs random vs randInt() vs Math.random() vs Math.randInt() vs ...

Adding a feature to 18 000 undocumented lines of code, written in PL/SQL. Oh, did I mention it was just a single function?

If programming languages were countries, which country would each language represent?

Disclaimer: its just a joke

Java: USA -- optimistic, powerful, likes to gloss over inconveniences.

C++: UK -- strong and exacting, but not so good at actually finishing things and tends to get overtaken by Java.

Python: The Netherlands. "Hey no problem, let'sh do it guysh!"

Ruby: France. Powerful, stylish and convinced of its own correctness, but somewhat ignored by everyone else.

Assembly language: India. Massive, deep, vitally important but full of problems.

Cobol: Russia. Once very powerful and written with managers in mind; but has ended up losing out.

SQL and PL/SQL: Germany. A solid, reliable workhorse of a language.

Javascript: Italy. Massively influential and loved by everyone, but breaks down easily.

Scala: Hungary. Technically pure and correct, but suffers from an unworkable obsession with grammar that will limit its future success.

C: Norway. Tough and dynamic, but not very exciting.

PHP: Brazil. A lot of beauty springs from it and it flaunts itself a lot, but it's secretly very conservative.

LISP: Iceland. Incredibly clever and well-organised, but icy and remote.

Perl: China. Able to do apparently almost anything, but rather inscrutable.

Swift: Japan. One minute it's nowhere, the next it's everywhere and your mobile phone relies on it.

C#: Switzerland. Beautiful and well thought-out, but expect to pay a lot if you want to get seriously involved.

R: Liechtenstein. Probably really amazing, especially if you're into big numbers, but no-one knows what it actually does.

Awk: North Korea. Stubbornly resists change, and its users appear to be unnaturally fond of it for reasons we can only speculate on.

Oracle database errors are fucking hilarious:

"Usually a pl/sql error"

Well thanks, but if I wanted an unhelpful and shitty response I would've asked myself, but it's great to know you're just as fucking useless.

Newbie just started this week and went changing hibernate settings on us. Changed hbm2ddl from update to create, which nukes the data on every deploy. She thought she was working against her local DB when in fact she was pointed at the shared integration database, thus nuking INT. Through a couple hours of PL/SQL wizardry, I managed to resurrect the data. Within 5 minutes of giving the team the all clear, the data disappeared again...betcha can guess what happened...again!

Fuck PL/SQL. Fuck Oracle. They're so big they can afford to deliver the most user-unfriendly experience i've ever seen.

I never knew that I was a good mentor at SQL , specially at PL/SQL.

I gave a task to a new member of my team, to fill 5 tables with data from other 15 tables.

I informed him well about data table info and structure. He spended about 3 days to create 25 different queries in order to fill 5 tables.

After I saw the 25 queries, I told him, that he could do it with 1 main query and 5 insert statements.

So I spended 1 hour of training, in order to build,run and explain how to create the best sql statements for this task.

(First 5 minutes)
It was looking so simple at the beginning from starting with 1 simple join, after some steps he lost my actions.

(Rest 55 minutes)
I was explained the sql statements I 've created and how Oracle works.

Now , every time he meets me, he feels so thankful for learning him all those Oracle sql tips in 1 hour.

Now he is working only with big data and he loves the sql.

I'm interviewing with the data architect in two weeks' time, a self-proclaimed ninja. The chap has done PL/SQL development on SQL Server 2008 according to his LinkedIn profile. Yeah, okaaay...

(I highly recommend to you to not read this, it's just something that I had been wanting to take off my head; seriously, if you want to read it, do it at your own risk, because it will be a huge waste of your time)

Oracle Academy is the worst crappy attempt from a Corporation to create a learning platform.

The directive and academic personnel of my faculty decided that it could be a good idea to teach SQL and PL/SQL during whatever online classes will last with Oracle Academy, and I truly strongly believe (including most of my friends and classmates) that it's one of the worst ideas that could be done.

At that platform you simply don't learn shit, you read page by page of shitty PPT-like PDF presentations (that most of those are from a decade ago and other from 5 years ago) that are a pain in the ass to read due to how poorly formatted they are or how it explains badly certain concepts due to how badly made some explaining examples are, and then at each section of the "Learning Course" I have to do a Quiz that asks theorical questions and tells you to make certain code reviews to see if something is wrong or not (also which they are just alike the presentations, poorly formatted, up to the point that those have many syntax errors that end up consufing anyone a lot) and the main problem with the quizes is that also the Oracle's PL/SQL Docs are so fucking badly made, that I have to check PDF by PDF and page by page the concept that I just forgot to see how to answer the goddamn question; I mean, there are Doc pages that are way better structured and obviusly external to Oracle, but not even those pages fully cover certain SQL and PL/SQL concepts.

Seriously though, who could be so fucking ill-minded to create a shittyful learning platform and not try to fucking improve nor enhance it at least every 2 fucking years, so the goddamn "learning" process isn't that stressful.

Thank you Jetbrains for all your products, but specially DataGrip...OFMG

We have so much pl/sql at our company and it really sucks because the "young" generation of devs must convince the pl/sql guys to switch to some more powerful and newer languages like java.

But not everyone wants to use the new stuff or learn anything new. I mean there are some programmers who really appreciate that there is new stuff. They have no problem learning from the younger generation. But some of them just resist any change in that direction, and thats the much higher amount of devs.

Does anyone of you have such experience? What can i do against that?
Is that some kind of "i am too old for this"-trip?

What are your thoughts about PL/SQL?

Fucking MySQL workbench won't even tell me what's wrong with my PL/SQL script. It has no output whatsoever. I click the run button and its like "y'all say sum?"

Why are all tools for SQL development so shit. All the time.

I once saw a DBA using two for loops in PL/SQL to join two tables. I wonder if he knew about the "alternative" way to do that...

Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.

I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.

1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture

If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL

Got accepted as a part-time FE developer in a well-known company.

Reality check: all I do is maintain a horribly formatted spaghetti code (20k+ lines in a file) using ancient tech like PL/SQL, prototypeJS and IE11.

Buy hey, at least I know some SQL magic now.. Right?!

One of the DB guys at work writes DB packages like this:

- open package in PL/SQL developer
- copy code to notepad
- edit PL/SQL code in notepad (yes, fucking windows notepad)
- copy and paste back from notepad to PL/SQL developer
- commit

Everytime I see him edit DB packages I can feel my brain mass shrinking.

It sucks that you need to transition to other roles.

Started as front-end dev, now I have to write PL/SQL code. Which I don't like and not confident as NodeJS, Vue, React, Angular4, Java, etc.

Oracle database with PL/SQL, heavy use of triggers, and viewception.

Sure, let's take what's supposed to be a data store, embed shitloads of logic in it, make sure everything has side effects, and ensure nothing is ever straightforward.

Untracable, impossible to debug and overall a mess of epic proportions!

PL/SQL is one of my primaries at work.

Does not have an official "multidimensional array" per-say. Instead you define anonymous tables types and point it at a different "record" type to define the structure. Then you can make a table of that table indexed by string/number/record/etc. It's all tables. Tables of tables of tables.

Reading it can be wild.

Darn you to Heck, Oracle! I installed their JDeveloper environment, to see how it's database functionality compared to DBArtisan and PL SQL Developer. It is Eclipse based, and it rendered DBArtisan non-functional. Uninstalled, and balance has been restored to the Universe.

Hey guys I've a question that's been on my mind for a little bit. I recently got my first full time dev job as a junior developer. Overall I'm really happy with the opportunity to work in the industry, but in the company we're using old technology ext js and PL/SQL. I'm wondering will this make things harder when looking for other jobs in the future that use more modern frameworks, or is it that the actual industry experience is more important?

Really long story. It begins when I was 11 years old, Harry Potter was kind of a hit (it was the beginning) and a lot of site based of the universe where popping everywhere on the internet. I wanted to make mine so much I subscribed to a french website which offered free tutorials on differents languages. The site is still up, it is now called OpenClassrooms and it saved my life a lot.
I tried to learn HTML (4 at the time if my memory's good) and CSS, but my mother didn't believe in my project and made me quit.
Nine years after, I was looking for something to do in my life: I tried a cursus in art history and archeology, I made a Baker school, but my life didn't feel filled.
I heard about a formation in a town near mine, and was for everyone, newbies or veterans, who wanted to have their diploma either in networks or in code.
The coding classes where fantastic. We learned VB.net, Pascal, php, laravel, C#, SQL, PL/SQL (we had a teacher who was absolutely fan of Oracle), I topped my class and now I am in the next formation for my Bachelor. Today I learn Java, Symfony, Android.
The ones who taught me to code? Internet, my teachers, books. But my teachers were the most important, because they gave me the confidence.

I hate pl-sql and data warehousing. For this project we're extracting from source tables using a generic method equal for every student, changing the data and then copying to a table for analytics.
Everyone's project is fine. Mine occupies 90mb and exceeds the quota already. Delivery due in 2 days... So much for that cs grad. FML.

TL;DR Is there a hackerrank for Oracle PL/SQL?

At my work, we do not get raises, we only get promotions. Promotions are applied for, and then interviewed for. Highest score (plus maybe some managerial bias) wins.

33% of the questions revolve around PL/SQL (and just Oracle DB in general) and the better you explain yourself, the better you score.

Tutorials just don't do it for me. They're boring. I want something interactive. While it doesn't need to be competitive and challenging like hackerrank, I'm looking for something gamified like hackerrank where I can see other people and learn the technology intimately so I can climb the ranks at my company faster.

Does anyone know of something sort of along the lines? All suggestions appreciated.

My family got our first computer when I was in the 1st grade and I really liked it a lot.

After some years I saw someone code and I was like "What's that?". After they explained me what they were doing I was totally hyped and started searching tutorial videos on how to do simple stuff on VB (this was in my 7th grade, I believe).

By the end of my 8th grade I was introduced to a Computer Engineer that lent me a RoR book and tried to teach me the basics.
(Fun fact: around this time I was doing a Habbo clone server with a friend of mine so that we could play with our friends without all the other people poking around).

In high school I took a Computer Technician course where I learnt stuff like VB, C#, PHP, MySQL, some basic CSS/HTML plus some hardware fundamentals.

After that course I tried to enter college and I failed on my first try, so I took a gap year were I worked as a dev for my family's computer repair shop. It was really a good experience to have time for myself while working on what I loved.

Now I'm on the 2nd year of a Bachelor in Computer Engineering (It's more about software than hardware actually), currently working with Java, C, IA-32 Assembly and PL/SQL. My goal is to get a Masters in Software Engineering after it.