rant && dev && education

So I just interviewed this guy for admission into our bootcamp and because he has raised some red flags before, I asked him to just write a factorial function and he chose HTML to do it. I told him he can certainly try thinking that maybe he doesn't know that whatever you write inside script tag is actually JavaScript. He went on to do this. What bothers me is he have a computer science diploma.

Till now I have just heard of these people but always taught those are just marketing or some person who think that just because they here HTML with some other programming language. BUT THIS IS SOME NEXT LEVEL SHIT.

29-year veteran here. Began programming professionally in 1990, writing BASIC applications for an 8-bit Apple II+ computer. Learned Pascal, C, Clipper, COBOL. Ironic side-story: back then, my university colleagues and I used to make fun of old COBOL programmers. Fortunately, I never had to actually work with the language, but the knowledge allowed me to qualify for a decent job position, back in '92.

For a while, I worked with an IBM mainframe, using REXX and EXEC2 scripting languages for the VM/SP operating system. Then I began programming for the web, wrote my first dynamic web applications with cgi-bin shell and Perl scripts. Used the little-known IBM Net.Data scripting language. I finally learned PHP and settled with it for many, many years.

I always wanted to be a programmer. As a kid I dreamed of being like Kevin Flynn, of TRON - create world famous videogames and live upstairs my own arcade place! Later on, at some point, I was disappointed, I questioned my skills, I thought I should do more, I let other people's expectations make feel bad. Then I finally realized I actually enjoy a quieter, simpler life. And I made peace with it.

I'm now like the old programmers I used to mock 30 years ago. There's so much shit inside my brain. And everything seems so damn complex these days. Frameworks, package managers, transpilers, layers and more layers of code. I try to keep up. And the more I learn, the more it seems I don't know.

Sometimes I feel tired. Yet, I still enjoy creating things and solving problems with programming. I still have fun learning. And after all these years, I learned to be proud of my work, even if it didn't turn out to be as glamorous as in the movies.

Computer programming is now a language according to Texas apparently

Today (as a joke), I asked my class if there were any “professional HTML programmers” who could help me.

Surprisingly a couple people came over with smirks on their face. I thought they were going along with the joke.

Turns out, they were serious. They legitimately believed that they were professional HTML programmers and talked to me in such a condescending way that I was speechless.

“This is called a file. See that part after the dot? That’s what makes it HTML. HTML is an incredibly hard programming language and powers CPUs and the computer that you are using.”

I didn’t know how to respond. Hopefully they were joking.

So, appearantly "excel" is a programming language.
And I am rejected couse "I don't even know main computer programs".
FML

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

Recipe for a Great Programmer:

Ingredients:
-Books for a computer science curriculum from a top university
-Computer
-Headphones
-Internet
-Stress ball
-Pillow
-Lighter fluid
-Food

Directions:

1. Cover computer science books with lighter fluid
2. Light books on fire
3. Use flames to cook an energy-rich meal for the thousands of hours ahead
4. Pick an IDE
5. Choose a project beyond current capabilities. Good ways to push boundaries:
- Unfamiliar domain (e.g. large scale data processing, UI programming, high performance computing, games)
- Exotic programming language
- Larger in scope than any project before
6. Shut up about your IDE
7. Attempt to build
8. Stop procrastinating on Hacker News
9. Re-attempt to build
10. Squeeze stress ball and scream into pillow as necessary to keep sanity
When stuck:
- Paste stack traces into Google
- Find appropriate mailing list to get guidance
- Realize that real learning happens when you are stuck, uncomfortable, and/or frustrated
- Seek out books, classes, or other resources AFTER you have a good understanding of your deficiencies
11. Repeat #4 to #10 for at least 10 years
12. Results guaranteed! (to the same extent static types guarantee bug-free programs)

source: nathanmarz.com

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.

This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.

[START RANT]

"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."

From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table

The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.

The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:

array[index]

Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.

Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:

a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";

a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.

This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,

"Algo! If I do this:

a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);

...then "first" appears in my console!"

Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:

Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):

el = arr + (sz * i)

This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.

That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.

So I used to be a chef, then I got married and decided my weekends and holidays were better spent than making food for ungrateful shit-wagglers, or getting screamed at in Lebanese by the exec Chef during dinner service at the end of a ten-hour shift, so I went back to school for Computer Engineering. I was so worried because I swore compulsively from day one of classes.
Little did I know way back then, the first programming language I ever learned was swearing.

Still trying to get good.

The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.

I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.

You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.

Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.

You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".

Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.

Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?

All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.

I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.

I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.

I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.

But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.

Scripting languages, markup languages, database querying languages, etc. Are all types of programming languages. A program is a set of instructions for a computer to follow.

HTML is a programming language, fight me.

I hope computing heavens have:

-One brand of hardware
-One OS
-One browser
-No closed source software
-No ads
-One monitor aspect ratio
-One fucking programming language with a fucking big standard library.
-Phones are just the same exactly the same OS as in computer, not stupid adaptations.
-All pages are only HTML/CSS, without JS.
-Due there is one browser and one OS, when you need a dynamic page, you can display a desktop app in the browser downloading its binary.
-There are one fucking brand on printer with standard drivers which are included in the OS.

We are so far from heaven

Computer Science is a mysterious world of three kinds of devs, irrespective of what background/profile/language they had/worked in.

The ones at the top, who keep doing crazy shit in big companies or open-source and keep adding material to the unstoppable code flowing. These constitute 5% of the dev community.

The ones at the bottom are the newbies who try to become masters/ninjas of programming by following the shit on the internet but don't understand logic or how things work. This is like 75% of dev community on the web. If you don't agree to that percentage, you don't know the number of students and non-CS people trying to code. I can see hundreds of classmates/colleagues with no understanding of basic Javascript concepts but introducing themselves as a software developer and ruler of the Web.

The remaining 15% in the middle are the "experienced" fellows who keep building shit to get to the top 5%. They work on enterprise/commercial software until the next upgrade and while the wallets keep getting fatter, they don't actually contribute to the community.
This is the part where I want people to understand the power of a dev.

What sets apart programmers/devs from other engineers:
while everyone else is busy solving the current issues/requirements of the world, we devs are the ones who 'build'.
With a right motive, a developer can solve in-numerous problems of the society, be it education, poverty or unemployment.

An experiment by Lee to put data on the web created a world of unforeseeable opportunities.
Hope to see more of Musks and less of Zuckerbergs in the future.

Am I the only one who is triggered by seeing all of the stupid articles claiming Java is bad introduction language? Just becuase Standford decided to change it to JavaScript? What the actual fuck? How students should learn the fundamentals concept of OOP in scripting language?
Don't get me wrong, I hate using Java for real life projects. But there is a reason why almost every university use it as introduciton language. It's great start to learn programming. Saying that the 'Hello World' in Java is complex and can scare people away, it's complete nonsens. For fuck sake, yes programming should be fun, but it is also hard. People can understand that they are going to learn what 'public static voiď means later. It's the structure of many Computer Science classes. It's the assigments that are not designed in engaging and fun way for newcomers. That's the problem, not the language.

Age 19, got a government sponsored chance to go to India to study. Was called to study for Law. But didn't like it. Decided I wanted to change to Computer Science cause that's what I was interested in. Go to India and apply for computer science course but not law despite Parents wanting me to do law because hey Lawyers job is a good status in society.

Got a spot in BCA (Bachelor of Computer Application) . Totally new in programming. Started with C. Was freaked out with all the new things. Variables, comments, Pre processors files. All was new to me. Although the lecture tried her best, I couldn't understand her well because of language barrier. It was a mixture of Hindi and English.

Luckily she gave me a book to read, Let us C. That book helped me a ton. I realized I really liked programming. When summer holiday came I taught myself C++ . Then next summer Java. Then Android. Then some Web Development. That was last summer. But I kinda settled in Android and did some projects in it. Right now I am about to sit for my final exam. Then I will try my best to get an Internship or a job.

I starten when I was 12 years old. I got bullied and got interested in computers. One day I crashed my dads computer and he reinstalled it. After that my dad made two accounts. The regular user (my account) and the Administrator user (my dads account). He also changed the language from Dutch to English. Gladly I could still use the computer by looking at the icons :')

Everytime I needed something installed I had to ask my dad first (for games mostly because there was no cable internet at that time). Then I noticed the other user account while looking over my dads shoulders. So I tried to guess the password and found out the password was the same as the label next to the password field "password".

At that point my interest in hacking had grown. So when we finally got cable internet and my own computer (the old one) MSN Messenger came around. I installed lots of stuff like flooders etc. Nobody I knew could do this and people always said; he is a hacker. Although it is not.

I learned about IP-address because we sometimes had trouble with the internet. So when my dad wasn't home he said to me. Click on this (command prompt) and type in; ipcondig /all. If you don't see an IP-address you should type in; ipconfig /renew.

Thats when I learned that every computer has a unique address and I started fooling around with hacking tools I found on internet (like; Subseven).

When I got older I had a new friend and fooled around with the hacking tools on his computer. Untill one day I went by my friend and he said; my neighbor just bought my old computer. The best part was that he didn't reinstall it. So we asked him to give us the "weird code on the website" his IP-Address and Subseven connected. It was awesome :'). (Windows firewall was not around back then and routers weren't as popular or needed)

At home I started looking up more hacking stuff and found a guide. I still remember it was a white page with only black letters like a text file. It said sometime like; To be a hacker you first need to understand programming. The website recommended Visual Basic 6 for beginners. I asked my parents to buy me a book about it and I started reading in the holliday.

It was hard for me but I really wanted to hack MSN accounts. When I got older I just played around and copy -> pasted code. I made my own MSN flooders and I noticed hacking isn't easy.

I kept programming and learned and learned. When I was 16/17 I started an education in programming. We learned C# and OOP (altho I hated OOP at first). I build my own hacking tool like "Subseven" and thats when I understood you need a "server" and "client" for a successful connection.

I quit the hacking because it was getting to difficult and after another education I'm now a fulltime back-end developer in C#.

That's my story in short :)

I met a rather talented developer some time ago that is highly proficient in C# as well as React and Angular for the creation of web programs.
Dude knows the ins and outs of C#, has been working on it since the early stages of ASP.NET.

I am always intrigued as to why certain people chose certain languages. When I asked him, he admitted to being very lost during his early days, and somehow settled on C# because of the file extension being cs, which made him think that it was the proper Computer Science programming language, get it? because of CS?

Now a days he does use a wide variety of stacks and languages, and he keeps up to date, not one of those "I don't need to learn anything new!" types of developers, the dude is absolutely l337, but i keep thinking that such a talented developer had such a funny start.

Typical conversation between my parents and me

Parents: Can you make stuff?

Me: Make what?

Parents: The thing you do all the time.

Me: "Computer stuff"?

Parents. Yah...

Me: Well, yes, why?

Parents: What can you do?

Me: Well, I know C# the most...

Parents: Can you then make software like Facebook, Twitter, etc?

Me: Well, I can, but that will take a lot of time.

Parents: You should really make something and make money.

Me: Ok. (goes into my room, and turns on laptop)

(a few monents later....)

--[[CHORUS START]]--

Parents: U DOIN COMPUTER???

Me: Uh-huh.

Parents: When did I said to do "Computer stuff"?

Me: Well, you said to rest.

Parents: But I never said to do your "Computer stuff"!

Me: But you said to rest. For an hour!

Parents: WHY U SHOUT AT ME!!!! TURN OFF THAT **** NOW!

Me: Ok.... (turns off and opens C# book immediately)

Parents: What's that?

Me: C# book

Parents: What's C#?

Me: Programming language.

Parents: Where can you use it?

Me: Make stuff.

Parents: Like what?

Me: (lists my personal projects)

Parents: Show me.

Me: (turns on the computer and shows one of it)

Parents: Good. (leaves)

--[[CHORUS END]]--

Me: (deep breath) Can I FINALLY use the computer?

--[[CHOURS]]--

FUCK LINUX

now that I have your attention, and you’re probably angry, too, please, even if you don’t read this rant, never use code.org again. now, onto the rant…

god dammit, code.org sucks. I mean, anyone who created it or associates with it should, well, be considered a terrorist. they’re bombing students futures in computer science with false, useless, bullshit information. not to mention, their sponsors like bill gates, mark zuckerburg, and other rich asses, talk in a video about some boring ass shit that is hard to understand for anyone who doesn’t program, and not to mention, they use a fucking five dollar microphone. ear rape. even if you look at a textual version of it, then read the information on it, it’s practically useless because it's so terribly explained, and also useless. ironically enough, they focus on their animations more than their actual explinations, or their students for that matter. the fact that we had to encode a picture in binary, made me about 50% dumber, give or take a 0 or 1. then, we had to do it in hex, which wasn’t really much better, although more realistic I supposed. what's really the most depressing thing about this class is its application in the real world. I've learnt nothing whatsoever that will help me in the real world, or in computer science. I suppose there's two things that may be useful (that I already knew): hex, and that TCP doesn't lose packets. that's it. those two things. five seconds worth of knowledge from the first quarter of the year. the ideas just make me want to throw up. teaching the main ideas of computer science without actually teaching it? one of the teachers (probably a good one) enrolled her students in an online programming course just so they could understand, because the explanations are just so terrible. this is the only [high school] computer science course offered by code.org, and I signed up because it's an AP computer science class (tried to get into AP Java, the day I was supposed to take the test to get into an upper level class, I was told it didn't count as a tech credit). seriously, fuck code.org. it makes you dumber. their 'app lab' environment is pointless, just like everything else. the app lab is basically where you have a set of commands and have to make a dog bark() or a storm trooper miss() [and that's hell when they haven't introduced while loops yet]. the app lab is literally code.org going out of their way to make everything that their students are learning pointless in the real world. seriously, why can't we just use a <canvas> like an ACTUAL PROGRAMMER would do if they were to make a browser game, not use an app engine so slow it would be faster to update windows and android studio each time I run an 'app' in their 'environment'. their excuse is that the skills "transfer over" to the real world. BITCH! IF I DIDN'T KNOW JAVA, AND I WANTED TO MAKE A GAME IN JAVA, I'M NOT GOING TO LEARN PYTHON, THEN "TRANSFER" THE SKILLS I LEARNT, I'M GOING TO LEARN FUCKING JAVA. AND THAT GOES FOR EVER OTHER LANGUAGE, PROJECT, ETC.

I'm begging you code.org, stop, get help.

This is going to be a rant, but personally, I'm pleased with the outcome of my life now.

I was part of a community for a few years and decided to help them out with my knowledge of programming Lua nearly 2 years ago since they lacked developers for the project itself.

Since it was sort of a custom language that they modified how Lua worked on it, it took me a bit to adapt, but within a few weeks, I was pretty fluent in this so-called custom language they had. Began working on some major updates, additions, removals, and just optimizing this code base. It was a pretty old code base and needed a good chunk of love.

A few months later, I've implemented loads of features, optimized the base whenever I could, and then things start taking a turn for the worse. We get new 'developers' who haven't ever coded the language, and worse they couldn't afford to provide them development servers thus they ended up breaking my servers. I helped them and they learned, they were decent, but now the Seniors and CEO's of the project began to take a toll on me.

I was told that this community had a reputation of driving out developers, ruining their reputations, and that is what started happening. I started getting questioned if I was loyal to helping them, that I've become lazy, even though they were explained I've had mental health issues for a few years and have been hospitalized multiple times.

These sort of attacks kept happening for months, and then they finally pushed my buttons, where I was talking to another Senior of how we should redo the base since it's just so massive and a few tiny updates to the base take a few days to implement across the entire code. What instead happened was that I went to sleep, and this Senior told the CEO I was going to steal the code base and go sell it...

I woke up to messages of how the CEO is all pissed off, and that this what the Senior said. At this point, I started responding with, fuck it. I was so sick and fucking tired of their bullshit. I was the only fucking competent developer, and I did more work in the few months I was there then some people did in 2 or 3 years.

A few hours later I decided to go chat with the CEO and explained what was truly brought up, and he just brushed it off like I was lying. At that point, I lost it. I told him why the code base was horrible since he hired stupid ass developers. He didn't know how to code. People wanted certain items, and he wouldn't be able to add them for fucking months and players sit there making fun of it. Some people state the only differences they see within the code is the code I've done. Basically, he was an incompetent fuck that said he knew what he was doing, and had all these big plans for the future yet couldn't listen to the only competent developer and fucking claimed bullshit.

Now a few months have gone by, I'm looking at their community and it's basically dead with no proper updates except for copy and paste updates claiming to be custom coded. While I'm working on my real life businesses (Which are currently being a headache, but within the year should resolve its issues), starting University for my Computer Science degree here soon, and even considering building my own game here.

Basically, karma is a bitch and that's why when you get loyal people in your life, keep them. (Writing this at 3 am after a few drinks, hopefully, it made sense, I think it does.)

Anyways, goodnight everyone.

"I keep telling you, I'm not a pilot"
"and I keep telling you, you fly boys crack me up!"

I'm not a developer, but I'm doing some complex things and I need the benefit of computers to work things out, so I know enough programming to get me by. Recently one of the uppers decided that all the amateur spaghetti python programs I'd quickly slapped together should be developed into tools that the clients engineers can use!

"How long do you need!."
" I have no idea how to make something like that",
"but it's all just maths right! you can figure it out",
"probably, given long enough bu.. "
"okay get started and we'll check in in a couple of weeks" "hold o.." "I'll give your pride and joy to the graduate to fuck up while you're working on that" "wai.. " "anyway got take this call, good luck"
┗|｀O′|┛

So here I am.. I have no idea what I'm doing.

So since I have a working knowledge of python, fortran and VBA, someone suggested I learn nim, which was not what he sold it as. Then a software engineer that went to the same uni as me, suggested RUST! you can't mess up rust, and look at this I created (shows me a decent looking desktop application) "I'll help you out". But it wasn't really that easy.

Then I asked some questions... that was my first mistake, that's not acceptable until you know what you're doing apparently. Especially when the answers are in the docs you can't find in a topic you don't understand for a version you're not using solved with a tool you've never heard of for an operating system you forgot existed. Look at this moron asking a question.

Okay to be fair, I went through the rust docs and it was well written, and I do really like this language. But I do not have a degree in computer science, and so many docs for crates are just written with an expectation of a certain level of knowledge. As soon as there's a build error, it's at least 3 -4 days of me faffing about trying to decipher hieroglyphics.

..and the graduate is about to unwittingly commit manslaughter..

I'm sure whoever needs to fix this mess in the future will post a rant about this train wreck.

"Programming language is a convention to give order to computer. It is not supposed to be obscure, bizarre and full of subtlz traps. These are the characteristics of magic" - Dave Small

I propose that the study of Rust and therefore the application of said programming language and all of the technology that compromises it should be made because the language is actually really fucking good. Reading and studying how it manages to manipulate and otherwise use memory without a garbage collector is something to be admired, illuminating in its own accord.

BUT going for it because it is a "beTter C++" should not constitute a basis for it's study.

Let me expand through anecdotal evidence, which is really not to be taken seriously, but at the same time what I am using for my reasoning behind this, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, for I am a software engineer yes, I do have academic training through a B.S in Computer Science yes, BUT my professional life has been solely dedicated to web development, which admittedly I do not go on about technical details of it with you all because: I am not allowed to(1) and (2)it is better for me to bitch and shit over other petty development related details.

Anecdotal and otherwise non statistically supported evidence: I have seen many motherfuckers doing shit in both C and C++ that ADMIT not covering their mistakes through the use of a debugger. Mostly because (A) using a debugger and proper IDE is for pendejos and debugging is for putos GDB is too hard and the VS IDE is waaaaaa "I onlLy NeeD Vim" and (B) "If an error would have registered then it would not have compiled no?", thus giving me the idea that the most common occurrences of issues through the use of the C father/son languages come from user error, non formal training in the language and a nice cusp of "fuck it it runs" while leaving all sorts of issues that come from manipulating the realm of the Gods "memory".
EVERY manual, book, coming all the way back to the K&C book talks about memory and the way in which developers of these 2 languages are able to manipulate and work on it. EVERY new standard of the ISO implementation of these languages deals, through community effort or standard documentation about the new items excised through features concerning MODERN (meaning, no, the shit you learned 20 years ago won't fucking cut it) will not cut it.

THUS if your ass is not constantly checking what the scalpel of electrical/circuitry/computational representation of algorithms CONDONES in what you are doing then YOU are the fucking problem.

Rust is thus no different from the original ideas of the developers behind Go when stating that their developers are not efficient enough to deal with X language, Rust protects you, because it knows that you are a fucking moron, so the compiler, advanced, and well made as it is, will give you warnings of your own idiotic tendencies, which would not have been required have you not been.....well....a fucking idiot.

Rust is a good language, but I feel one that came out from the necessity of people writing system level software as a bunch of fucking morons.
This speaks a lot more of our academic endeavors and current documentation than anything else. But to me DEALING with the idea of adapting Rust as a better C++ should come from a different point of view.

Do I agree with Linus's point of view of C++? fuck no, I do not, he is a kernel engineer, a damn good one at that regardless of what Dr. Tanenbaum believes(ed) but not everyone writes kernels, and sometimes that everyone requires OOP and additions to the language that they use. Else I would be a fucking moron for dabbling in the dictionary of languages that I use professionally.
BUT in terms of C++ being unsafe and unsecured and a horrible alternative to Rust I personaly do not believe so. I see it as a powerful white canvas, in which you are able to paint software to the best of your ability WHICH then requires thorough scrutiny from the entire team. NOT a quick replacement for something that protects your from your own stupidity BY impending the use of what are otherwise unknown "safe" features.

To be clear: I am not diminishing Rust as the powerhouse of a language that it is, myself I am quite invested in the language. But instead do not feel the reason/need before articles claiming it as the C++ killer.

I am currently heavily invested in C++ since I am trying a lot of different things for a lot of projects, and have been able to discern multiple pain points and unsafe features. Mainly the reason for this is documentation (your mother knows C++) and tooling, ide support, debugging operations, plethora of resources come from it and I have been able to push out to my secret project a lot of good dealings. WHICH I will eventually replicate with Rust to see the main differences.

Online articles stating that one will delimit or otherwise kill the other is well....wrong to me. And not the proper approach.

Anyways, I like big tits and small waists.

First year: intro to programming, basic data structures and algos, parallel programming, databases and a project to finish it. Homework should be kept track of via some version control. Should also be some calculus and linear algebra.

Second year:
Introduce more complex subjects such as programming paradigms, compilers and language theory, low level programming + logic design + basic processor design, logic for system verification, statistics and graph theory. Should also be a project with a company.

Year three:
Advanced algos, datastructures and algorithm analysis. Intro to Computer and data security. Optional courses in graphics programming, machine learning, compilers and automata, embedded systems etc. ends with a big project that goes in depth into a CS subject, not a regular software project in java basically.

TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.

Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.

But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).

Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.

Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.

So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.

I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.

How do you cope with something like this?

There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):

John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.

Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.

Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.

Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.

Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.

Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.

Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.

Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!

A failed programmer!

Back in school the computer screen was my canvas, the keyboard was my brush and i filled it in with the colors of a language. Helping my fellow students debug and find the solution to their codes. Loved to do that its been 10 years thats i have programmed anything I am trying to figure out where is lost it all. Never got into a job working as programmer as in all the interviews I was asked of definition of things I could never remember but give a something to build or debug I could work it as a charm. Even though didn’t work a programmer kept on programming at home making free programs for friends or helping debug codes. But then I stopped and don’t know why and I really wanna get back into it not for others but for myself to see if i still have it, but its been so long new languages new platform and don’t know where to start. Or should I accept myself as a failed programmer!

Ye, so after studying for an eternity and doing some odd jobs here and there, all I can show for are following traits:

* Super knowledgeable in arm/Intel assembly language
* C-Veteran with knowledge of some sick and nasty C-hacks/tricks which would even sour the mood of your grandma
* Acquired disdain of any and all scripting languages (how dare you write something in one line for which I need a whole library for!)
* All-in-all low-level programmer type of guy (gimme those juicy registers to write into!)

After completing the mandatory part of my computer science studies, all I did was immerse myself into low-level stuff. Even started to hold lectures and all.

Now I'm at the cusp of being let free into the open market.
The thing is: I'm pretty sure that no company is really interested in my knowledge, as no one really writes assembly anymore.

Sure, embedded programming is still a thing, but even that is becoming increasingly more abstract, with God knows how many layers of software between the hardware and the dev, just to hide all the scary bits underneath.

So, are there people in here who're actually exposed to assembly or any hands-on hardware-programming?
Like, on a "which bit in which register/addr do I need to set" - kind of way.

And if so, what would you say someone like me should lookout for in a company to match my interest to theirs?
Or is it just a pipe dream, so I'd need to brace myself to a mundane software engineer career where I have to process a ticket at a time?

(Just to give a reference: even the most hardware-inclined companies I found "near" me are developing UIs with HTML5 to be used in some such environment ....)

I started with C#at the age of 12, it was way too complicated and I learned Lua for Computer craft instead. Next I learned Ruby for RPG Maker and finally Javascript for web Dev stuff.
Now comfortable enought with Javascript but put off by its quirks I learned Java for compiling faulty minecraft mods, but I only fully learned it in school.
At the same time I learned python and quite liked it for scripting, but ultimately it was not a good match for my projects.
Disapointed with Java I returned to C# and liked it quite a lot, but started learning C++. After touching my first Microcontroller I learned C and I've stuck with it as my favorite language.
Along the way I picked up Kotlin, in case I need to do some Java shit. Much better.
But how did I come to an understanding of programming. Well I got better after each time I got a layer deeper until I hit silicon.
I had tinkered with electronics since I was 15 so I just had to study some boolean mathematics in school and some vintage computers architecture and instruction sets and...
Then I finally understood how that shit I wrote in Lua way back when was actually executed by my hardware.

Allways dig deeper and you'll find enlightenment eventually.

8 years ago,
I studied in a small school and every year we had computer classes, but most of the times, it gets cancelled or we just sit and browse and sometimes few of us don't even get a computer.
In that time, the only reason I was attached with the computer was due to games.
Our curriculum mentioned HTML, CSS, Access and Excel, which none of the teachers taught us for past 2 years. I wanted to learn all does, but gave up since no one cared about it.(please note that time, I didn't know even to use YouTube or W3schools to learn stuffs)
Then, a new student joined in our class and also a new computer ma'am joined our school. Both of them turned out to be really fun when it comes to learning computers.
She was active during last sessions and teach us HTML, CSS. I even started writing blogs which she taught. The most surprising part was she was super frank. She went beyond her duty, and taught me what Facebook is, how to use it, and opened an account for me which I am still using it, and she sent a friend request to herself. (In lab, past teachers would shout to students trying to open fb. All of them were super strict.)
She was kind and friendly, and during theory classes, the new student in our class would answer every single question. Then, somehow we both started sharing sits in computer class, and he will tell me answers and we both raise hands to answer the question. My teacher will also keep asking interesting questions which made me more inclined to computer science.

My story isn't related to learning a programming language or an algorithm, but it was the wave that brought me closer towards CS and after 2 years, I joined CS in University and till now, haven't look back and always thanked both of them, my respected ma'am and my dear friend, who inspired me and brought out my curiosity towards computers.
Note: My friend is doing Medical currently and when I teased him that I did CS and now, I know more than you and this time, I am gonna whisper in your ears if someone asks any question, to which he replied, I accept I am doing Medical, but I still love computers and know a hell lot about it.
My teacher got married and she also got a cute baby. We talk occasionally in fb and she is going great too.
I hope to meet both of them someday soon.

tl;dr Do you think we will any time soon move from editing raw source code? Will IDE or other interfaces allow us to change the code in graphic representation or even through voice?
---

One thing I found funny watching Westworld is how they depicted the "programming" - it is more like swiping on a smartphone, a bit maybe like Tom Cruise's investigations in Minority report. Or giving certain commands and key words by voice.

There was one quote from Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" I could never find again, where he said something along the lines, that back in the seventies or eighties they thought they would soon raise programming languages to such a high level they would use natural language interfaces, and look at us now, still the same "if's".

So I feel uncomfortable without my shell and having tried a graphical programming language once this particular (Labview) seemed clumsy to me at best. But maybe there are a lot of web devs here and it seems with them frameworks you might be able to abstract away a lot of the pesky system programming... so do you feel like moving to some new shiny programming experience or do you think it will stay the same for more decades as the computer is that stupid machine where you have to spill it out instruction by instruction anyways?

Today in programming class.
FizzBuzz on a sheet of paper. I mean, of course I aced the one thing I do in every language I learn. :)

Our teacher then proceeded to talk about the fact that some people, even having studied Computer Science, were unable to make a FizzBuzz program.

w h a t ?

I'm studying Computer Science and Engineering in Uni.

People don't understand the most fundamental principles of programming at all. Variables and functions are like a foreign language to them.

I get that not everyone knows everything but if you decide to go to uni to study programming, and you have never programmed before. Are you really in the right place?

Just reading Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, where he created an own assembly language, so the book doesn't rely on a currently in fashion language... Meanwhile teaching students to code a GUI in java swing, because it was the new shit when the syllabus was created...

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

python machine learning tutorials:
- import preprocessed dataset in perfect format specially crafted to match the model instead of reading from file like an actual real life would work
- use images data for recurrent neural network and see no problem
- use Conv1D for 2d input data like images
- use two letter variable names that only tutorial creator knows what they mean.
- do 10 data transformation in 1 line with no explanation of what is going on
- just enter these magic words
- okey guys thanks for watching make sure to hit that subscribe button

ehh, the machine learning ecosystem is burning pile of shit let me give you some examples:

- thanks to years of object oriented programming research and most wonderful abstractions we have "loss.backward()" which have no apparent connection to model but it affects the model, good to know
- cannot install the python packages because python must be >= 3.9 and at the same time < 3.9
- runtime error with bullshit cryptic message
- python having no data types but pytorch forces you to specify float32
- lets throw away the module name of a function with these simple tricks:
"import torch.nn.functional as F"
"import torch_geometric.transforms as T"
- tensor.detach().cpu().numpy() ???
- class NeuralNetwork(torch.nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super(NeuralNetwork, self).__init__() ????
- lets call a function that switches on the tracking of math operations on tensors "model.train()" instead of something more indicative of the function actual effect like "model.set_mode_to_train()"
- what the fuck is ".iloc" ?
- solving environment -/- brings back memories when you could make a breakfast while the computer was turning on
- hey lets choose the slowest, most sloppy and inconsistent language ever created for high performance computing task called "data sCieNcE". but.. but. you can use numpy! I DONT GIVE A SHIT about numpy why don't you motherfuckers create a language that is inherently performant instead of calling some convoluted c++ library that requires 10s of dependencies? Why don't you create a package management system that works without me having to try random bullshit for 3 hours???
- lets set as industry standard a jupyter notebook which is not git compatible and have either 2 second latency of tab completion, no tab completion, no documentation on hover or useless documentation on hover, no way to easily redo the changes, no autosave, no error highlighting and possibility to use variable defined in a cell below in the cell above it
- lets use inconsistent variable names like "read_csv" and "isfile"
- lets pass a boolean variable as a string "true"
- lets contribute to tech enabled authoritarianism and create a face recognition and object detection models that china uses to destroy uyghur minority
- lets create a license plate computer vision system that will help government surveillance everyone, guys what a great idea

I don't want to deal with this bullshit language, bullshit ecosystem and bullshit unethical tech anymore.

Is the way people solve problems intrinsic to the native language they learned growing up? Can the shape of our thoughts be optimal for solving certain kinds of problems? Like sentence structure, grammar, etc.

If the pattern of thoughts a language promotes can help us solve problems. Then is there a spoken language that can help promote solving computer science problems?

I know I have to work to think differently to program in different styles of programming. I wonder if we can learn from different spoken languages patterns of logic that are applicable to engineering.

Mathematics, while not a spoken language, has helped me re-frame things in programming. I think programming has also helped in other areas. Like using binary search to find the end of a pipe in the ground.

When it comes to the idea of programming and magic, or the comparison between software developers/engineers, computer scientists etc as magicians or wizards, nothing brings the idea much more close to hearth than the C programming language.

A while ago I read the R.A Salvatore books concerning Drizzt, the dark elf. I loved the books, have not continued reading them but I remember them vividly. There was one book in which a human magician came about wielding extremely explosive magic, humans were capable of channeling large amounts of it through explosive and unwieldly ends.

This is the same feeling I get from C

Consider:
int items[] = {1, 2, 3};
printf("Third : %i\n", 3[items]);

and fuck me if shit like the above is not dangerous, it makes sense, arrays have the first items of it server as the pointer address to a first element, doing the above operation returns the third element of the array of 3. But holy shit if I don't think this is dangerous and interesting as fuck

there are many more examples I have that I am finding through me fucking around with: language development (compiler, interpreter), kernel programming as well as net sec. C is the most powerful and devastating thing we have in our hands indeed.

I remembered one time my freakin prof in programming taugh us how to understand computer language, that time my worst enemy is ASSEMBLY, for some reasons my teacher doesn't know how to code in assembly like wtf?

On our last grading period he asked us to create a program using mov and shift and the deadline is set tomorrow after he announced it.

I remember my code in that freaking subject

MOV COURSE
SHIFT SCHOOL

HAHAHAHA after that I was scolded big time 😂

Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.

Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.

Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.

A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.

The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..

As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.

But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.

One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.

But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.

So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.

As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.

If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.

Thanks for reading.

Just a quick rant on JavaScript,
So there’s a lot of people hating javascript, and while not a long time ago i was part of them, but I changed my opinion a little.

I think JavaScript is a great way to deal with website programming as it is quick and efficient, but I would not say to program directly on it, use a js-compilable language (CoffeScript, TypeScript, Kotlin(I think), etc.), but then you might say: “Well, no need for js then, compile it in byte code”. That would break the point of how I see web design/dev. The main intent behind webpages is to have an easy and fast way to send code to other computers to render them, that’s why it is interpreted: “Easy to send” and “*All* computers can handle it” with the proper browser. You need to be able to change the way the website is rendered and/or works sometimes, for diverse reasons like copy/pasting data, make it render properly or use plugins/add-ons to change that code to suit your needs.

I think js should be kept as a “readable byte-code”, so that means: {

Keep comments when compiling the js-compilable code,

Add standardized machine-readable comments that will indicate to smart code viewers how to show a particular thing (Like have a higher-end function compiled in js shown as a minimized code with explanations of the function)

Keep it nicely formated and don’t obfuscate (coz that’s annoying)

Etc.
}

So you bypass the quirks and all that pesky js stuff, while keeping it’s good sides.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Part 2:

Web design for non-web:

Ok so things like node.js, electron, react-native and all that stuff; I won’t say they’re bad but...

Why we have this is because web designers wanted to make desktop apps and were like “Hey! Making web pages is easy! Let’s port it to desktop”, the problem is: Web technologies were made to work on a restricted canvas, aka a browser. It’s good on web for reasons mention earlier and more. But it’s not on desktop! You’re trying to push it outside of those boundaries. It’s difficult to make it break that canvas and go outside, make something that really works! For social media clients and that kind of stuff that you want to make a little more inclusive, yes! it’s a great idea (hello devrantron ;), but not if it’s an exact same copy of the website, just use the website. But for things that are supposed to really make use of YOUR computer; no!

I see those PWA (progressive webapps aka mobile app, but it’s an offline website”), I stand for the same positions, social media and those sort of things: yes, great idea! Games? 🤢.

I have way more to say but I have difficulties to remember them while reading, so feel free to comment your thoughts

Lol, “just a quick rant”

Chemists recently "compiled" a programming language into chemicals! I'll admit that I have no clue how it works, but they were able to get a mathematical function working without any electronics. The article I read doesn't describe the speed of the reaction, so I'm not sure if it's really useful as a replacement for computer operations.

Some people of devRant are astonishingly stupid.

I post a rant of Ryan Dahl where he says he don't like the unnecessary complexity of modern software. It's an obvious UX rant, but @Crost says that it's about rushing releases and writing sloppy code to "tick the item off my list and solve the problem". @Crost and other boubas, if Ryan's vision was more widespread, macOS, the OS you all hate so much, wouldn't have existed because Linux would have the best UX ever.

I post a rant about Google algo being nasty and throwing triggering shit at me. I previously posted stuff like this, Root confirmed that it works just the way I think it works, it's a manipulative piece of crap. But @Oktokolo says that "The algorithm literally just gives you same of the stuff you just saw", well, I don't know, nice view of the problem for a guy with no computer and no smartphone, @Oktokolo! All that "youtube recommendations gathered us together on some obscure video" comments, and you still don't get it.

I post a rant about how I redesigned a fucking color wheel icon. It shows a "before-after" pic and the colors are obviously the same, but fucking @Oktokolo be popping up again, telling me that I have eye condition (!) that makes me see more blues than yellows.

No wonder you guys don't know how to use CSS, the simplest programming language (yes, it's a programming language).

No wonder smart people like SortOfTested just leave.

I still refuse to believe that devRant user base consists of stupid people exclusively. Perhaps they are just average, and I'm the genius with my Aspergers just getting way more information out of my environment like I always do.

One of my cousin started his higher studies in Computer Sciences. He asked me to teach him any web language so I started with JavaScript. After one week, he came to me complaining that according to his C++ professor, JS is a worst programming language. The professor told him not to learn it.

WTH?

Past two years when I was in 7th grade, my computer teacher taught us the first programming language ie Python. At first, I just copied the syntax in my copy, and in the evening, I searched for it on YT

This introduced me to a new world of programming and I started learning it further

!rant

You knoe, my first insights into computer programming came out of spite. I thought windows to be garbage and wanted to blame someone other than myself for my machine constantly crashing. Thus I discovered programming and down the rabbit hole. But my interest in computer science came from videogames. Portal in particular. I found the idea of GlaDOS fascinating and thought that artificial intelligence would be something interesting to research. The web then gave me Lisp, and boy was the language different from all the other languages I went through. I remember feeling super excited when Racket, Common Lisp and eventually Clojure would help me discover many different ideas. Every time I work with reduce or maps or stuff like that in other languages I always thank languages such as Clojure for having me descipher different ways of manipulating data to get a result. To this day I feel sad whenever I find that my languages do not have the same constructs that Clojure has. I mention Clojure because it is my favorite flavor of Lisp. But one thing that always remains grest to me is firing up Emacs and plugin my code to Slime or Cider and see the repl pop up waiting for something to happen. This feeling is beautiful.

Please guys, if you have not tried it, do so! You might hate it at first or push it aside. But trust me, once you get it it will really change the way you think about programming in general. Try the great Clojure for the Brave and true, and go through the third chapter succesfully. If you do not like Lisp by them then no harm done! You would at least know that there are other options.

Now, here are some cool things:
For the standard implementation, try Common Lisp

For a more modern Scheme, try Racket or Guile

For targetting the JVM try Clojure (more akin to Common Lisp) or Kawa (scheme like)

For the python AST get Hy (pun totally intended)

For JS try Clojurescript

For emacs scripting try Emacs Lisp (has way too many disasdvantages but still relatively close to common lisp)

Honorific mention to more pure functional programming languages for Haskell, F#, Ocaml.

Also worth mentioning that Js , Ruby and Python have great functional constructs.

(println "you will not regret it!")

So today, my friend (who is younger) has returned from a programming competition hosted by the district. The language used was Pascal. Before the competition my friend had been pretty confident about his skills of using Free Pascal, but after that, he has been different.
He came back in tears. I asked him what was happening in the computer room.
- Turbo Pascal.
I was stunned for seconds. Who the heck in this 2019 still uses an ancient compiler dated from the 1990s for the DOS operating system? And yet the competition's computers had only it installed. I think nowadays everyone learning Pascal, at the very least, uses Free Pascal as the IDE. I could immediately imagine how restrictive and frustrating was programming on such that thing.
- I couldn't create... dynamic arrays... so I had to declare two 30 000-element arrays (which was required by the problem), but when compiling... it said... the maximum heap size was 64KB.
It wouldn't let me use "exit(result)" (to return a function's result) so I wasted many minutes replacing them with "<function name> := result; exit;".

And many more problems.

Raise your hand if you think this is ridiculous.

I was really bad in physics and we had energy, force and all that stuff, when I got to C, my very first programming language. I learned the formulas by writing a program calculating all the stuff we learned about in school.:D

Back then I didn't have a computer and wrote the code on paper before actually compiling it at my moms computer.

Hello DevRant,
I need your help
I'm currently studying Game design and development first year in The Netherlands and I love programming but I hate designing. I was thinking about changing the course to something like Ethical Hacking or Computer science. The reason why I want to do this is that they teach us openfl until second year and I feel like I learn nothing until now.
Do you think would be better to change the course or to stay but start programming in something else? And what programming language would you recommend?
P.s. I also want to apply for a part time job/summer school to gain experience but I had no luck at all.
P.s.s. You are the best community for me!
Return 0;

One advantage of being reasonably proficient with Haskell is being able to very quickly create maintainable programs, often without needing to write extensive documentation.

One disadvantage of having Haskell as a favourite programming language is sometimes looking like a pretentious ass.
But just read the type definition and think for once, idiot. How could "Monad m => (a1 -> a2 -> a3 -> a4 -> r) -> m a1 -> m a2 -> m a3 -> m a4 -> m r" confuse even a beginner to computer programming, nonetheless Haskell?

Lots of good suggestions up in here.

My personal prefference:

Such as there are governing bodies indiciating how a programming language evolves and a web consortium...there should be a computer science one. That dictates fundamental approaches covering everything that belongs to this wonderful branch of science. Everything from math to differenr scientific branches all the way down to turtles. And for it to be standarized and updated. Indeed, if you want to spend your entire existence gobbling js in the form of web sites then that is fine, but you should have sufficient knowledge to branch out into more academic pursuits if required.

Also, updated tools would be better, every aspiring computer scientist shall be able to navigate through all major operating systems and programming environments regardless of their beliefs and or prefferences and schools should provide said environments in their classrooms.

Data Strucrutes and Algorithms should be a must. Software engineering principles should be a must. Calculus, Algebra and Statistics as well as Physica should be a must.
And succesfully navigating over different engineering areas should be a must.

Not to cleanse the industry. Fuck your elitist mentality. If you think that programming is a sacred art that should exclude people then I really hope you fucking disapear from existence. No, not to cleanse. But to expand the industry and maybe show people that there is more than fucking around between node modules or gemsets.

Peace pendejos

**drops your mom's fatass...i mean mic**

The near future is in IOT and device programming...
In ten years most of us will have some kind of central control and more and more stuff connected to IOT, security will be even a bigger problem with all the Firmware bugs and 0-day exploits, and In 10 years IOT programmers will be like today's plumbers... You need one to make a custom build and you must pay an excessive hour salary.
My country is already getting Ready, I'm starting next month a 1-year course on automation and electronics programming paid by the government.

On the other hand, most users will use fewer computers and more tablets and phones, meaning jobs in the backend and device apps programming and less in general computer programs for the general public.

Programmers jobs will increase as general jobs decrease, as many jobs will be replaced by machines, but such machines still need to be programmed, meaning trading 10 low-level jobs for 1 or 2 programming jobs.

Unlike most job areas, self-tough and Bootcamp programmers will have a chance for a job, as experience and knowledge will be more important than a "canudo" (Portuguese expression for the paper you get at the end of a university course). And we will see an increase of Programmer jobs class, with lower paid jobs for less experienced and more well-paid jobs for engineers.

In 10 years the market will be flooded with programmers and computer engineers, as many countries are investing in computer classes in the first years of the kids, So most kids will know at least one programming language at the end of their school and more about computers than most people these days.

WARNING - a lot of text.
I am open for questions and discussions :)

I am not an education program specialist and I can't decide what's best for everyone. It is hard process of managing the prigram which is going through a lot of instances.
Computer Science.
Speaking about schools: regular schools does not prepare computer scientists. I have a lot of thoughts abouth whether we need or do NOT need such amount of knowledge in some subjects, but that's completely different story. Back to cs.
The main problem is that IT sphere evolves exceedingly fast (compared to others) and education system adaptation is honestly too slow.
SC studies in schools needs to be reformed almost every year to accept updates and corrections, but education system in most countries does not support that, thats the main problem. In basic course, which is for everyone I'd suggest to tell about brief computer usage, like office, OS basics, etc. But not only MS stuff... Linux is no more that nerdy stuff from 90', it's evolved and ready to use OS for everyone. So basic OS tour, like wtf is MAC, Linux (you can show Ubuntu/Mint, etc - the easy stuff) would be great... Also, show students cloud technologies. Like, you have an option to do *that* in your browser! And, yeah, classy stuff like what's USB and what's MB/GB and other basic stuff.. not digging into it for 6 months, but just brief overview wuth some useful info... Everyone had seen a PC by the time they are studying cs anyway.. and somewhere at the end we can introduce programming, what you can do with it and maybe hello world in whatever language, but no more.. 'cause it's still class for everyone, no need to explain stars there.
For last years, where shit's getting serious, like where you can choose: study cs or not - there we can teach programming. In my country it's 2 years. It's possible to cover OOP principles of +/- modern language (Java or C++ is not bad too, maybe even GO, whatever, that's not me who will decide it. Point that it's not from 70') + VCS + sime real world app like simplified, but still functional bookstore managing app.
That's about schools.

Speaking about universities - logic isbthe same. It needs to be modern and accept corrections and updates every year. And now it depends on what you're studying there. Are you going to have software engineering diploma or business system analyst...
Generally speaking, for developers - we need more real world scenarios and I guess, some technologies and frameworks. Ofc, theory too, but not that stuff from 1980. Come-on, nowadays nobody specifies 1 functional requirement in several pages and, generally, nobody is writing that specification for 2 years. Product becomes obsolete and it's haven't even started yet.
Everything changes, whether it is how we write specification documents, or literally anything else in IT.

Once more, morale: update CS program yearly, goddammit

How to do it - it's the whole another topic.

Thank you for reading.

Hmm... My first experience with computers was in 1991 or so, when my then best friend had C64. And I was 7. My first PC arrived in 1993. Prince of Persia is the first game I remember from that time. I started programming in 1995 or '96, writing useless things in Pascal. Using PHP since 2000. Still that’s my main programming language. And sadly, my kids have different hobbies than me, so they aren’t even trying to program.

I remember the sound of modem connecting thru phone line to some BBS systems and later to the first public and free internet service in Poland. I remember simple, really „computer-like” voice of my dad’s speech synthesizer (he’s blind person). I remember, when our time to „play on PC” was limited to max 1hr a day... What will our kids remember?

Can anyone help me with this theory about microprocessor, cpu and computers in general?

( I used to love programming when during school days when it was just basic searching/sorting and oop. Even in college , when it advanced to language details , compilers and data structures, i was fine. But subjects like coa and microprocessors, which kind of explains the working of hardware behind the brain that is a computer is so difficult to understand for me 😭😭😭)

How a computer works? All i knew was that when a bulb gets connected to a battery via wires, some metal inside it starts glowing and we see light. No magics involved till now.

Then came the von Neumann architecture which says a computer consists of 4 things : i/o devices, system bus ,memory and cpu. I/0 and memory interact with system bus, which is controlled by cpu . Thus cpu controls everything and that's how computer works.

Wait, what?
Let's take an easy example of calc. i pressed 1+2= on keyboard, it showed me '1+2=' and then '3'. How the hell that hapenned ?

Then some video told me this : every key in your keyboard is connected to a multiplexer which gives a special "code" to the processer regarding the key press.
The "control unit" of cpu commands the ram to store every character until '=' is pressed (which is a kind of interrupt telling the cpu to start processing) . RAM is simply a bunch of storage circuits (which can store some 1s) along with another bunch of circuits which can retrieve these data.

Up till now, the control unit knows that memory has (for eg):
Value 1 stored as 0001 at some address 34A
Value + stored as 11001101 at some address 34B
Value 2 stored as 0010 at some Address 23B

On recieving code for '=' press, the "control unit" commands the "alu" unit of cpu to fectch data from memory , understand it and calculate the result(i e the "fetch, decode and execute" cycle)

Alu fetches the "codes" from the memory, which translates to ADD 34A,23B i.e add the data stored at addresses 34a , 23b. The alu retrieves values present at given addresses, passes them through its adder circuit and puts the result at some new address 21H.

The control unit then fetches this result from new address and via, system busses, sends this new value to display's memory loaded at some memory port 4044.
The display picks it up and instantly shows it.

My problems:
1. Is this all correct? Does this only happens?

2. Please expand this more.
How is this system bus, alu, cpu , working?
What are the registers, accumulators , flip flops in the memory?
What are the machine cycles?
What are instructions cycles , opcodes, instruction codes ?
Where does assembly language comes in?
How does cpu manipulates memory?
This data bus , control bus, what are they?
I have come across so many weird words i dont understand dma, interrupts , memory mapped i/o devices, etc. Somebody please explain.

Ps : am learning about the fucking 8085 microprocessor in class and i can't even relate to basic computer architecture. I had flunked the coa paper which i now realise why, coz its so confusing. :'''(

My first introductions to programming was in Garry's mod.
There'e a mod called wiremod, which added logic gates, buttons, and other entities that manipulated the game with input/output. And on top of that a little scripting language they called Expression 2.

Me and some friends would code stupid things in Expression all day to use in the game.
I wasn't too good at it, but I had fun. Shortly after I started going to a high school with a computer science focus, and had 2 years of proper education in C#.

My mum signed me up for a robotics workshop with Lego mindstorms... i kept going to these workshops, doing some of them multiple times. At some point we went from graphical programming to some other kids language, than we made a robocup junior team from the kids who were like me and kept on showing up at these workshops and used arduino and C. Had a break for a year or so from coding so I could finish school, then I went studying computer science at Uni. And the rest is history.

First and foremost, students should be carefully taught the logic and mentality behind programming. Most of the time I see that the introductory programming courses waste so much energy in teaching the language itself. So students kinda just get fucked cause many people end up ending the course without having actually gained the "programming perspective".
Stop teaching pointers and lambdas and even leave the object oriented stiff till later. If a student doesn't know why we use a For loop then how can they learn anything else.
I believe once that thing in your brain clicks about programming, everything goes smooth from there... kinda :P

Second of all, and this pertains mainly to the engineering and science disciplines.
We need a fundamental and strong mathematical foundation. And no I don't mean taking fucking double integrals. Teach us Linear Algebra, Graph theory, the properties of matrices, and Probability theory.
One of the things I suffered from most and regret in university is having a weak foundation in math and having to spend more time catching myself up to speed.
It's so annoying reading a paper on a new algorithm or method and feeling like an idiot because I can't understand what magic these people did.

Numerical Methods...
Ok this is more deeper, maybe a 2nd year course.
But this is something we take for granted.
Computers don't magically add and subtract and multiply.
They fuck up.
And it'll bite you in the ass if you're not even aware that the computer we all love so much isn't as perfect as we think

Some hardware knowledge.
Probably a basic embedded systems course with arduinos
just so you can get a feel for how our beautiful software actually makes those electrons go weeeeeeeee

And finally
Practice practice
Projects projects
like honestly
just give me the internet and some projects
Ill learn everything else
Projects are the best motivation
I hate this purely theoretical approach
where we memorize or read code and write these stupid exams
Test what we are capable off
make us do projects that take sleepless nights and litres of coffee
And judge our methods, documentation, team work, and output

Team work skills and tools (VCS, communicating, project management, etc.)

Documentation and Reporting
Properly
:)
maybe even with LaTeX :D

Yeah that's the gist of whats on my mind at the moment regarding an ideal computer science education
At least the foundations
The rest I leave it to the next dude.

I spent a lot of my time as a little kid playing video games and typing on my old computer. Somehow I found GameMaker (6 or 7, I think) and started pumping out little games with the free version. I didn't like the drag and drop stuff so I learned GML (GameMaker Language).

A few years later someone gave me a PHP book and while I never actually learned anything from it, it did get me interested in learning a real programming language (not GML).

Around this time Minecraft became popular, and with a lot of YouTube videos I got a grasp on Java, and a little C++/C#.

Tinkering around in scripting languages finally lead me to JavaScript which of course introduced me to HTML and CSS.

I loved how quickly a website could me created compared to a compiled program, so I started spending most of my time learning Web Technologies.

And that leads me to where I am today. By this point I've spent over half of my life programing in various languages and formats and I've loved every bit of it!

When I was in 5th grade, my school had bought few computers (I don't remember on which OS they were running back in 1999) and they'd installed Logo on it.

For those who are not familiar with Logo, it was a programming language for educational purpose. The main highlight of this programming language was, it had a graphical on-screen cursor called "Turtle". Users had to type in commands to make this cursor move on the screen. Like "Right 90" would turn the cursor by 90 degrees.

This was my first official exposure to a computer.

After reading mostly sad (and astonishing!) stories, I didn't really want to share my story.. but still, here I am, trying to contribute a wholesome story.

For me, this whole story started very early. I can't tell how old I was but I'm going to guess I was about 5 or 6, when my mom did websites for a small company, which basically consisted of her and.. that's it. She did pretty impressive stuff (for back then) and I was allowed to watch her do stuff sometimes.
Being also allowed to watch her play Sims and other games, my interest in computer science grew more and more and the wish to create "something that draws some windows on the screen and did stuff" became more real every day.

I started to read books about HTML, CSS and JS when I was around 10 or something. And I remember as it was yesterday: After finishing the HTML book I thought "Well that's easy. Why is this something people pay for?" - Then I started reading about CSS. I did not understand a single thing. Nothing made sense for me. I read the pages over and over again and I couldn't really make any sense of it (Mind you, I didn't have a computer back then, I just had a few hours a week on MOM-PC ^^)
But I really wanted to know how all this pretty-looking stuff worked and I tried to read it again around 1 year later. And I kid you not, it was a whole different book. It all made sense now. And I wrote my first markups with stylings and my dream became more and more reality. But there was one thing lacking. Back in the days, when there was no fancy CSS3. It was JavaScript. Long story short: It - again - made no fucken sense to me what the books told me.

Fast forward a few years, I was about 14. JavaScript was my fucken passion, I loved it. When I had no clue about CSS, I'd always ask my mom for tips. (Side story: These days it's the other way around, she asks me for tips. And it makes me unbelievably proud!)
But there was something missing. All this newschool canvas-stuff wasn't done back then and I wanted more. More possibilities, more performance, more everything.

Stuff begun to become wild. My stepdad (we didn't have the best connection) studied engineering back then, so he had to learn C. With him having this immensely thick book for C, I began to read it and got to know the language. I fell in love again. C was/is fucken awesome.
I made myself some calculators for physics and some other basic stuff and I had much fun using and learning it. I even did some game development, when I heard about people making C-coded games for PSP. Oh boy, the nights I spent in IRCs chatting with people about C, PSP-programming and all that good stuff, I'll never forget it - greatest time of my life!

But I got back to JS more and more and today I do it for money and I love it. I'll never forget my roots and my excurse into the C/C++ world and I'm proud to say, that I was able to more or less grow up with coding and the mindset that comes with it.

I missed this last week... so too bad ;)

My introduction into programming was rather slow. When I was a child, we had an Apple IIc, but there were no disks. When you'd boot it up, you got a prompt and I recall being able to type commands into it that someone told me was "Apple BASIC".

At the same time, our family computer was a 386 and it came with something called GWBasic. I was a huge Mortal Kombat fan as well, and I recall finding the moves for the game on an AOL usenet. I took them all and wrote a program in BASIC that let you search and find moves for your character. I distributed this on some floppies to friends.

After that I lost interest. My "Information Systems" shop in high school was more about how to use Office than it was about programming. A few years later I found out that you could run your own text-based games (MUDs) and I quickly jumped into that and the C language.

From there, I was in and out of programming - C, to C++. Java and PHP, then back to Java. It would be about 15 years later until I finally realized I wasn't bad at this and land a job doing it. :)

I think my first encounter with a PC was when my cousins invited me to play a video game. I had never used a keyboard or mouse, I did not know how to turn a computer on or off.

For that reason my parents encouraged me to study basic computing, that helped me get a part-time job, and I realized that knowing how to use computer systems gave me a certain advantage over my other colleagues.

That led me to study engineering related to telecommunications, but I didn't know how to program and I didn't have the required level, obviously I failed the first course. But there was a teacher who supported me to study programming with the C language. I will always thank that teacher for helping me and seeing that I had programming skills, which helped me a lot to finish my degree.

Fate chose Computer Science for me.

It's only after 1st semester of Computer Science Undergraduate Program that I came across C, my first programming language. I had no idea what a CS Degree is all about. It was a blind shot, to be honest.

I wrote a few programs and fell in love with coding. I got high after solving every problem. I craved for more. It's all magical!

I'm enjoying every moment of my developer career. It's a hell lot of fun! I'm glad that my blind shot turned out be a good one.

Programmer looking for a new language

I have been a JavaScript developer for a few years now (non professionally) and I really like the language. I mainly program for execution with NodeJS rather than web, because I feel like I get more freedom (e.i. the ability to use a computer file system).

I normally never use other people's libraries and instead either write my own library/ies for the specific task or use an old one. I only ever use someone else’s if I need a quick frame work to test an idea, never for something I will actually use.
I prefer to work object / class orientated.

I have worked on distributed servers with NodeJS before, however trying to distribute a load across one computer across it's multiple threads has proved problematic due to the heavy delays of standard io transfer speeds.

Why do I want to switch?:
•Because JavaScript is not at all created with multithreading in mind, and pretty much any multithreading solution is a bodge and allot of the time it is more efficient to work single threaded.
•Also, I get the sense that JavaScript + NodeJS is not used often in the programming industry comparison to other languages like; ruby, python, and I don't want to get stuck in a nesh language of which would decrease my employment chances heavy.

Side Note: I have been working on a pet project to have a distributed database (made with nodejs), and so far, there are no language specific problems, but I feel like it would be more efficient if I used a programming language designed more to cater for multi threading.

should I take computer science and if I should Can I choose a programming language or will I have to just see what they have to offer?

What programming books do you all recommend?

Language wise any books on C, GoLang, Python, Rust, and LUA are welcome

And topic wise I’m interested in books about computer science theory, network programming, low level programming, and backend programming are welcome.

I know it’s a wide variety of topics but some are stuff Im currently doing, I’ve already messed with and just really want to learn more or focus on, or plan to do it when I get around to it

(heading)How a programming language is created? Because I want to make my own.(heading)

I am learning C and next I will learn C++, SQL,DS&A, Assembley, Lex&Yacc,Operating Systems, Computer Arcticture, Computer Networks because I think it's enough for my goal. The only reason I am learning this, to make my own C++ clone with my own knowledge. But I really don't know how can I create my own programming language like C++ from scratch. Like what are the first steps to began with. As I know that C, first step is Preprocessor then Compiler then Assembler then (Loader/Linker).

Anyone please give me a step by step guide like learn this language first then this then this. So I can finally reach that amount of knowledge which I can implement to create my own programming language like C++.

(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)

The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.

This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.

Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.

So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.

Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.

Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.

PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day.

Probably my dad. He encouraged me to experiment with the computer really early. He got me a c++ book (I know, the best language to start :D) and we sat down in the evenings programming together.

It really sucks when you realize that you're gonna end up despising a programming language just from having an extremely shitty first experience with it.

About ten weeks ago I was forced to, despite that I was SUPPOSED to be able to choose the language myself, to learn C++ for this course when having literally not a single fucking bit of experience with it whatsoever. And that's pretty soon after already having a beyond shitty experience with the very same school AND the same teacher. (The school I study at "rent" courses from other schools, this is one of them.)

I have the final exam on Monday and I'm allowed to have a book on C++ with me to use as reference, as (I'm pretty sure) I won't have internet access on the computer I'll be doing the test on. I ordered a book with express shipping to be here during this week, Friday at the latest. Never arrived. Called customer service at the book store and apparently it was supposed to have shipped yesterday but hadn't and they didn't know why (fucking awesome girl at the customer service btw, 11/10 quality service). So we cancelled the order, sure, we get the money back, but I still won't have a reference for a language I barely know at all. (No need to mention libraries, did that, dead end.)

Oh, and about that school and that earlier experience I spoke of, because if their inability to do their motherfucking jobs, earlier this year I ended up struggling with money for a couple of months. I really want to fucking strangle these assholes and have them pay my fucking bills to cover the shit that THEY caused.

TLDR; I'm gonna end up hating C++ because of shitty fucking teachers at an even shittier school.

C++ is the building blocks for many high-level programming languages, and since 1984 its first appearance in the markets the C++ core committee developers have introduced its 4 new versions which are C++03 (ISO/IEC 14882:2003 second edition), C++11 (third edition), C++14 (fourth edition) and C++17 is the fifth edition. With each new version, developers introduced new features, libraries and APIs in it.

C++ introduced as the extension of C programming language which made C++ as a compiled programming language, which means the developer required a C++ compiler to translate the C++ code to its equivalent machine or byte language, so the Operating system of the computer can execute the program.

There are various C++ compilers in the market and most of them are open source and free to use, however conventionally when we say C++ compiler, we basically talk about GCC which stands for GNU Compiler Collection.

What is GCC?

GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection, and it is a collection of programming compilers which induce C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, and some versions of Java. The first version of GCC introduced in 1987 and it was also known as GNU C compiler which became the standard compiler for C programming language, in that same year GCC also provided Compiler support for the C++ programming language.

Now GCC has various versions and each version give specific support for C++ versions, by now if we look at all the versions of GCC, we have a stable GCC for every version of C++, but there are some exceptions with C++11.

C++11:

C++11 introduced as the 2nd update version of C++, it suffixes 11 because it released in 2011 or because on August 12, 2011, ISO gives official approval to it. Formally C++11 known as C++0X because developers were expecting the new update released in 2010, but with its release in 2011, the core committee developer of C++ changed its name by C++0X to C++11.

C++ 11 replaced the old version of C++03, and it also brings many new features for the C++ developers. The main aim of designing C++11 to stabilize and maintain the backward compatibility of new C++ version with the C+98 and C programming language and that’s become the main reason why core committee developers only introduced new features in the old standard library rather than extending the core language.

 

GCC does not give Full Support to C++11:

GCC version GCC 4.8.1 purpose the first feature-complete implementation of the C++11 standard, however, the 4.8 and 4.7 does not give the full support for the C++11. The current version of GCC provides the major support for all the standard features of C++11 but if you are using the GCC 4.8 or 4.7 versions then your GCC only provide you with the experimental support for the C++11.

To use the Experimental support of GCC you need to enable it first before you compile or run you C++ 11 version code.

use code std=c++11 or -std=gnu++11 to enable the experimental support for C++11.

Was excited my company was pushing for talent profile updates. Filled all my computer programming skills in, then language skills, I thought it was fantastic. Go to the email and it states update job skills relevant to job held. Pretty sure that means I just wasted my time. =\

What computer language should I start with to learn programming?

First semester tutorials are fun (spoiler they can be frustrating).

Today my University held an entry level tutorial for LaTeX, which I had already visited a year ago and offered to help and boy ohh boy was that painful. For your information all of these students want to study computer science.

From around 50 people there was only one person who used Linux and I thought "Well at least one".

I was even more impressed as the other tutors asked me to help her because she used Manjaro (also the distribution I use).

As i helped her installing texstudio (the software presented) I needed her to enter the root (?) password and she answered "Which password, it's the laptop of my sister, I thought the laptop had windows installed".

Everything worked out fine but this was only the beginning.

After an hour came the first exercise in which the students had to build a simple document and for everyone who doesn't know LaTeX, it's a markdown language which heavily relies on \ and {}.

And there laid the other most common problem, some Mac users didn't even know how to write a \ or {}.

At least I had some fun helping them but if you want to study computer science you should be able to know how to write some of the most common symbols in programming languages.

Cross post from /r/cscareerquestions

Hey guys how are you all doing!?
I got into university this September (Computer Engineering & Informatics).
Although I've been programming java since I was 14 (github.com/zarkopafilis), discussions with a friend who is a dot net guy and has been working full-time C# for 2 years now got me thinking.
Alright, Java's good. I've learned to love and hate the language. I also like Spring Boot and whole this ecosystem of stuff including Scala and the other Java based languages. Currently I'm in the proccess of completing some personal project of mine.
Alright, here's the big question: Assuming I am going to graduate (and start working) in 5-7-8 years (Masters, PhD - who knows), which language would you suggest I stick with and start learning? - for backend programming of course.
Don't tell me JavaScript. Although I don't like it I've digested the fact that I'll have to learn some of it for sure.
Currently that's what I'm thinking: Invest some more time learning how the JVM works (and probably keep improving my code quality). Also learn some more stuff regarding Spring Boot (and/or Web Services in general). Then advance onto Scala till couple of years pass. In that time I shall keep improving my SQL skills.
On the other hand I may start learning C# along with .NETcore .
Sidenote: Personally I prefer statically typed languages, that's why I dislike stuff like js and python although I occasionally find myself fiddling with small projects like some laser tracker written with python + opencv.
Sorry if this reads like a big disorganized dump of thoughts. Thanks in advance! :)

I had a conversation with a friend.

I : since most modern programming languages handle most of the algorithms like sorting algorithms for arrays / dictionary or finding shortest path algorithms for path location. Do you think it is still important to learn to algorithms and design since most modern programming languages handle those for you.

Friend : Nope, since it’s already available for you why should you care of how they works since they are already embedded in the programming language itself. If you are a computer scientist yes, you must learn those stuff, but if you are an IT graduate or a mere developer you dont need to learn those stuff. That’s why I am confuse in my college days why did we need to learn algorithm and design.

What is your opinion guys? Quite disappointed with his answer.

How do I print a the contents of a file using command line arguments in C or C++

Firstly give me the skill equivalent to the best in the field. If the rules allow it all of these skills listed and if not any of these :-
1. Computer networking to the point of having the same knowledge as the best in the field. Why? I am curious about that stuff and being able to work as a network engineer if I don't get a good Dev job

2. Cyber security. Why? I enjoy it and being able to make sure my code is not easily exploitable is a cherry on top. Also having a backup job in case I don't get a good dev job

3. Being able to communicate with non dev people about developer or non developer stuff easily and being a really good leader.

4. Being a good developer in whatever language I use and instantly being able to learn new programming languages and frameworks or libraries with ultra in depth information.

I have failed my computer organization and architecture module because i didn't understand assembly language.
Anyone with links to the best x86 assembly programming please share.