I can't think of bad habits, only positive ones; plenty of them! (Maybe it's because I don't use a poor language?)
Is it garbage collected?
Apparently mine isn't, I've got to take it out every Monday...
What real life bad habits has programming given you?
41–50 of 90 posts
Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?
#42Two stick out:
1. Answering questions fairly literally.
a. "Did you like the salad?" "No, I did not."
b. "Would you like to go to the fine art museum with me and 4 of my friends on Friday night?" "No, I would not like that."
c. Note that I can escape from this pattern only when it's extremely obvious the truthful answer is a bad one.
"Do these jeans make my ass look fat?" "I don't think it's the jeans..." I can avoid those at least...
2. Intentionally filtering out mundane trivia from my brain. "Do you know so-and-so's phone number?" "No, but it's in my phone." "When you left this morning, did you notice if my black gloves were on the counter?" "I would never notice them unless they were on fire or something..."
Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?
#43Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?
#44Have a condition where I always need to carry some single-day use medical equipment around. I have created a mental invariant that says that unused, spare units are in my right back-pocket, the one that is currently in use is in the left front pocket, while the left back-pocket is for trash. This allows me to easily "poll" for whether I'm equipped to leave home, and has made sure that I have not once in 15 years foun…
You should hack lifehacker with an 'article ;-)
Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?
#45Pedantry
I recently interviewed at a place where they had set up a tip jar -- you had to put a quarter in it if you were caught pedantically correcting someone.
Eventually it devolved into merciless trolling :)
Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?
#46When I count things (in the real world), I now have a bad habit of starting a zero. "How many floors on that building?" "Let's see, 0, 1, 2... oh wait..."
I remember counting from 0 when I was young, while all the other kids counted from 1. I considered myself right then and still do. That was well before I had any exposure to programming. Guess I was born for this profession.
Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?
#47I keep a lot of things sorted. For example, my wallet's money is always sorted. With multiple denominations of bills, the insertions aren't O(1) when I'm in line if you know what I mean.
I perform insertions of multiple denominations by pre-sorting the new bills and then just merge with wallet bills.
Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it's most often people say "or" when they mean xor, and "and/or" when they mean or. So perhaps we should start saying either "or" or "ior" (inexclusive or).
The "and/or" thing actually sort of makes sense if you take "or" to mean "xor", since (A XOR B) OR (A AND B) equals (A OR B)
So, slash is really 'or'?
Oh, my head.
Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?
#49Whenever I pay for something in cash, I'm trying to make it so that the change I get back requires the least notes or is simpler. For example, if I owe $7.84, I might give $13.09 so that I get $5.25. I sometimes get confused looks. Related to that, I don't like having more than 4 $1 bills. I feel like, at some point, I didn't give the cash I should have.
I do this too! Only sometimes I confuse myself and end up looking like an idiot.
Re: What real life bad habits has programming given you?
#50Not so much that programming has given me, but constantly having to come up with analogies to explain highly technical concepts to my non-technical co-workers has invaded my life. "See, your username and password are like a combination lock, where the Kerberos ticket is a key. When you authenticate to the portal, you hand the key to the website, which validates it, and lets you in... but the key is actually in your b…
Oh, and then the followup... "Yes, the key is invisible."