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No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

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Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#31

Post by resonious »

BirAdam wrote: post #25

You can always just use vim, no plugins, and a book. No one said that one must use a fancy IDE and online stuff.

This varies wildly person to person but for me, it's not only about the means. It's a combination of means and end. If I want the computer to do something, and the only way to get it to do so is read a book and tinker, the reading and tinkering are very fun. If I could just ask the computer in plain English (which I can now), I would. Of course it's way less of a fun journey then. But just reading and tinkering with no extrinsic element is not a fun journey.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#32

Post by miohtama »

comrade1234 wrote: post #5

I had a project at a private bank where we couldn't use the internet - we had to turn our phones in when we checked in, had to use their computers on their network, couldn't access the outside internet... we did have access to api documents electronically thankfully. If we wanted to update a library it had to go through a big security review that took weeks. It slowed work down a lot but was totally fine - the bank w…

It was same for some Nokia projects, it was called "blackbox" model (other people where not allowed to see in the room you were developing in).

Possible but very inefficient way of doing things.

Also very secure.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#33

Post by fsniper »

BirAdam wrote: post #25

You can always just use vim, no plugins, and a book. No one said that one must use a fancy IDE and online stuff.

That's not enough as the abstraction of hardware and software has increased exponentially. Not only that expectations are more. Just building for a definitive set of single configuration is not enough. Any software needs to run on Amd64, RiscV, Arm64, has to be containerised, and run on OsX, Windows, Linux.. Nowadays you would need more and more knowledge/experience to be able to function without external help.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#34

Post by jasode »

esseph wrote: post #29
[deleted] wrote: post #10

[deleted]

> Just last week, I spent several hours reading the rsync C Language source code line-by-line so I could write a custom patch to add nanoseconds to the file creation dates. Pause I need to hear about this :) What is your use case, if you don't mind sharing?

>What is your use case, if you don't mind sharing?

I have custom utilities that detects moved/renamed files by analyzing heuristics of filesize, modification times, and creation times. It can work with files' timestamps without any fractional seconds (nanoseconds) but the most reliable and confident heuristics takes advantage of nanoseconds to build the most accurate hashtable of files.

The latest rsync 3.4.4 will copy creation times but it didn't copy over the nanoseconds. It does copy the nanoseconds for file modification times but not the creation/birth times.

Command line file sync tools like rsync or robocopy can't detect file moves which means they will blindly delete files from the old spot and re-copy them to the new spot. Imagine a directory that's 2 terabytes full of files that were just renamed. Those utilities will delete 2 terabytes then recopy another 2 terabytes. It's a risk of losing 2 tb of files if there's a interruption and needless SSD wear & tear.

I may send my changes up to the rsync github repo. I just don't have an active account at the moment.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#35

Post by adrian_b »

esseph wrote: post #29
[deleted] wrote: post #10

[deleted]

> Just last week, I spent several hours reading the rsync C Language source code line-by-line so I could write a custom patch to add nanoseconds to the file creation dates. Pause I need to hear about this :) What is your use case, if you don't mind sharing?

I cannot see the original comment as it was deleted, but it seems very weird.

There are indeed a lot of Linux/UNIX programs that lose metadata when copying or archiving files, like losing extended file attributes or the high-resolution timestamps with nanosecond resolution.

The filesystems that I use (XFS on Linux and UFS on FreeBSD) have timestamps with nanosecond resolution and also extended file attributes, so I was also annoyed in the past when discovering the many utilities that lose metadata.

However, rsync is one of the few utilities that preserve all metadata even when copying between distinct file systems, e.g. between UFS and XFS.

That is why for many years I have never used anything else except rsync over ssh, to be sure that the metadata is intact.

However, to preserve metadata no Linux utility may be used with default options.

For instance, I alias rsync to '/usr/bin/rsync --archive --xattrs --acls --hard-links --progress --rsh="ssh -p XXX -l YYYY"'

Therefore I wonder on which filesystem the previous poster has seen that rsync loses metadata, because this does not match my experience.

In the past, I have also patched some open-source programs to preserve the high-resolution timestamps, but rsync was OK since the beginning.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#36

Post by pitchlatte »

resonious wrote: post #31
BirAdam wrote: post #25

You can always just use vim, no plugins, and a book. No one said that one must use a fancy IDE and online stuff.

This varies wildly person to person but for me, it's not only about the means. It's a combination of means and end. If I want the computer to do something, and the only way to get it to do so is read a book and tinker, the reading and tinkering are very fun. If I could just ask the computer in plain English (which I can now), I would. Of course it's way less of a fun journey then. But just reading and tinkering with…

i understand this very well. i’m trying to work through SICP but without a goal i’m struggling even though i enjoy LISP. on the other hand i’m playing Mindustry[1] in which you can use a kind of domain specific assembly language called mlog, and there’s very little documentation and no in-game console for error messages, so the code either works or doesn’t and you have to manually print assertions to understand what’s going wrong. in some ways similar to this article. we had an intro to 8085 in school but beyond that i would otherwise have never bothered to learn low level stuff, but i’m having a very good time now.

AI tools can write mlog but there’s not much of it out there so they frequently make errors, making it even more of a “you’re on your own” experience. i recommend the game anyway (it’s libre) but the opportunity to code this way has considerably added to the enjoyment for me.

[1] https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#37

Post by adrian_b »

jasode wrote: post #34
esseph wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just last week, I spent several hours reading the rsync C Language source code line-by-line so I could write a custom patch to add nanoseconds to the file creation dates. Pause I need to hear about this :) What is your use case, if you don't mind sharing?

>What is your use case, if you don't mind sharing? I have custom utilities that detects moved/renamed files by analyzing heuristics of filesize, modification times, and creation times. It can work with files' timestamps without any fractional seconds (nanoseconds) but the most reliable and confident heuristics takes advantage of nanoseconds to build the most accurate hashtable of files. The latest rsync 3.4.4 will co…

OK, you may be right.

I have always verified that rsync copies the modification timestamps with nanosecond resolution, because I use these timestamps, but I have never looked at the creation times, because I do not use them.

I always have content hashes attached to files in an extended attribute.

For detecting duplicates with different names I always use the content hash, which is much more reliable than a creation timestamp and it is also useful for other purposes, e.g. for detecting file corruption.

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