Fuck whoever invented octal literals with just a zero prefix. 042 should never not equal 42. How hard is it to have 0x42 for hex, 0b11 for binary and 0c42 for octal

Do things in JS they said, it'll be easier they said...

(After a few WTF's i found the problem, arr.map passes more parameters to parseInt than just the strings. It also passes an array index that gets interpreted as radix)

I'm a contractor at a product company and today I had the pleasure of working with some jQuery.

A function needed to be called before another function, hard work right?

So I moved the call to the function 3 rows higher, checked it in, set the task as ready for test and started to look for other tasks.
Within a couple of minutes I get a direct message from another dev, let's call him Steve.
Steve wanted me to set the task to ready for code review instead of test, so I did just that and tried to move on.

Some minute or two later Steve contacts me again:
"It would be great if you'd move the comment so it'd be over the call to the function"

Well, I'm not one of those who likes comments... If you need a comment, it's probably not good/readable code. In some cases sure, it might be a complex block coming up.
Sorry, lost my train of thought.

I answered Steve : "Are you sure, I could just remove it instead?"

(for readability S will be Steve and M will be me)

S: Well, it's always good to have comments
M: In this case I think it will be alright.
S: But it's nice to see what the function is doing.
M: I'll do it if you really want me to.
S: It's better to have the comment than to not have it and needing it.
M: Okay then

The name of the function : LoadOrganizationTree()

And this is the comment :
//Load organization tree

Since we're limiting this to things on my desk I can't do any more deep cuts out of my calculator collection, but this one is still somewhat interesting.

The HP 32S was my friend throughout university, it replaced the 15c I used before which does not live on my desk. The notable thing about the 32s is the fact it's an RPN calculator. RPN calculators are the best way to have friends never ask to borrow your calculator. The exchange will start by them asking to use it, you saying sure, and them handing it back a few minutes later without saying a word.

There's two kinds of people in this world. People who go "wtf" in an interview when asked to create a calculator program using a stack, and people who were oddballs and for whatever reason used reverse polish notation devices.

For those not familiar, rather than entering values into the calculator in "10+10" fashion, you instead provide it a compositional set of values until an operation is provided (10,10,+) at which point it executes. The why is, this type of operation allows the calculator to more naturally process operations, and eliminates the need for parenthesis which makes the operations less error prone in practice and easier to track.

The 32s had a 4 year run before being replaced by the 32SII. In the same way using a Curta will give you a significant understanding of how radix computations and floating points work. Using an HP 32s (or any of its predecessors) will do the same for algebraic functions, because you had to program them yourself using a basic label address system that also had subroutine support.

Kids who grew up with graphing calculators don't know how good you had it 😋

There are only 10 types of people in this world: those who were expecting a binary joke, those who were expecting a base 3 joke, those who were expecting a base 4 joke, ... , and those who were not expecting a radix or base joke.

There is a mAtHeMaTicAl pRoOf 🤡 that a comparison-based sorting algorithm cannot get more efficient than O(n*log n). That's bullshit. Radix sort et al. — granted, they're not comparison-based.

But there is one comparison-based algorithm that can sort an array in O(n). It's called Stalin sort.

It traverses the array and deletes every item that doesn't appear in order. Boom, problem solved — the array is sorted in O(n), at the expense of losing (most of the) elements.

This is the perfect metaphor of Stalin's politics.

Oh man, I found the names for the different number bases past 36! I should expand my base converter!

That doesn’t... look right...

Ah, because these ones require the use of encoding algorithms.

NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE

When the QA guy (outsourced to India) asks you what version of Firefox it is that teamcity is using to run the code *double faceplate*

"VB was so much better, on error resume next kept our customers at bay"

This is one of the questions on my sample exam. I love how the answer is just "use radix sort".