The dumbing-down of programming (1998) • Hacker News Board

Re: The dumbing-down of programming (1998)

#31

Post by sho » Sat, May 16, 2009, 5:35 PM UTC

uninverted wrote: post #13

Hexstream wrote: post #5

"Run as the root user from the root directory, type in rm -r f * , and, at the stroke of the ENTER key, gone are all the files and directories. Recursively, each directory deleting itself once its files have been deleted, right down to the very directory from which you entered the command: the snake swallowing its tail." Actually that would be rm -rf * and it wouldn't delete /, the directory from which you entered th…

Actually, I don't think you can delete / at all on unix. It's its own parent.

I think they have disabled it in Ubuntu? But I believe it used to work, if it doesn't still, in other distros. I mean half the reason it's verboten to run as root is that you might accidentally type "rm -rf pics /".

I am too afraid to find out, anyway.

Re: The dumbing-down of programming (1998)

#32

Post by rodburch » Sat, May 16, 2009, 5:58 PM UTC

rodburch wrote: post #30

nailer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I found the article moronic. Witness: 'Linux: home-brewed, hobbyist, group-hacked. UNIX-like operating system created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds then passed around from hand to hand like so much anti-Soviet samizdat. Noncommercial, sold on the cheap mainly for the cost of the documentation, impracticable except perhaps for the thrill of actually looking at the source code and utterly useless to my life as a so…

lol are we the only two ppl on this article who actually know anything about computers? all the other comments seem to have been written by my mom. did u bust a gut at all that "peeling back the layers" so she could start replacing windows with linux? AHAHAHAHAHAHA or that crap about rom basic? PUT IN THE FUCKING LINUX FLOPPY MOM!!! god. this fucktard is a SOFTWARE ENGINEER. plz, kill me now. no, actually, this kind…

hacker news :)

Re: The dumbing-down of programming (1998)

#33

Post by jasonkester » Sat, May 16, 2009, 8:03 PM UTC

Nice read.

I can't find any empathy with the author though. Her description of getting a cd-rom drive working in Linux embodies all the things I dislike about working with computers, and is the probably reason my dealing with Linux have been so painful.

I simply don't want another hobby. And even if I did, it wouldn't be "getting my computer to function at all." Linux seems to enforce this hobby on me, every step of the way. Granted it's a lot easier 10 year on from this article, but it's still just not fun for me.

I'd rather spend my time writing code.

Re: The dumbing-down of programming (1998)

#34

Post by Zak » Mon, May 18, 2009, 7:29 AM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #27

Zak wrote: post #24

Code generation is nearly always the Wrong Thing. Using the right abstractions is the Right Thing. The problem is it leads to a bunch of duplicated code... and they you have to change something. The one exception might be scaffolding code, which isn't really intended to be kept.

The nice thing about Code Generation is that you can do it as often as you like. So if you change something, you just re-generate all the boilerplate and you're back in business. This is the one instance where I'll argue in favor of duplicated code. When something breaks in one of your generated classes, you'll find yourself on a breakpoint at a single line that does a single thing, so you can quickly figure out what…

I'm inclined to suggest that the right abstraction be implemented well so it's not so hard to debug.

Proper macros provide a nice way to blend the advantages of each. There are even some new languages that have them without looking like Lisp (Plot and Ioke come to mind).