Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What programming languages are used late at night?

stackoverflow.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 244 posts

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#201

Post by emmelaich »

cstrahan wrote: post #69
startupdiscuss wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, let me ask you the same questions: 1. What is your development environment? 2. What you do when there is an issue?

I'm not the parent, but here's what I'd do (and, indeed, have done): Read the manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html Just sit down one weekend, and read it from beginning to end. The information contained therein is just about exhaustive. Assuming you touch bash scripts daily (as I do), there's really little excuse for not mastering the language. Referring to SO every time you stumble into an issu…

I did something similar at the start of my admin/programming career.

1. Read the entire UNIX manual (wasn't that big at the time) 2. Read Rochkind "Advanced UNIX Programming" 3. Read K&R "The C Programming Language" 4. Read K&P "The UNIX Programming Environment"

sometime later I also read (parts of) Stevens UNIX Networking.

I'd say these made a very strong base from which to learning everything else.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#203

Post by ikeyany »

matt4077 wrote: post #19
onion2k wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus someone who is doing dev work at night is more likely to be working alone and they won't have an office full of coworkers to ask before they Google. That's bound to skew the results a little.

Unless there are some secret Sharepoint Nightclubs or Subversive Subversion Speakeasies I have yet to find, that would affect all languages, and couldn't explain these day/night patterns.

I was thinking that some languages like C++ take a lot longer between "tests" (e.g. compile times) and are thus more prone to be worked on at odd times.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#204

Post by thewhitetulip »

frogfuzion wrote: post #32
thewhitetulip wrote: post #22

I really do not understand how anyone could judge up which languages are being used at X time during the day or night based on stackoverflow. I rarely use stackoverflow (like once a few months), how do we factor in the data which we don't have in it? What's the accuracy of the current data? And how can we foem conclusion? The post should say, "What tags are used to ask questions on stackoverflow at night?" Because, a…

The point is that it's interesting to infer trends. This is not the supposed to be the authoritative source for what people are doing during day and night. It's just interesting and you can glean some patterns for sure. Stack overflow is hugely popular and millions of developers use it. Some people I guess are just so bright that they don't need it. That is not most people.

Their title makes it sound autoritative!

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#205

Post by jrochkind1 »

johndubchak wrote: post #21
falcolas wrote: post #2

Otherwise written as "what programming languages are being asked about late at night." To me, who rarely pulls up SO, correlating SO questions and page views with usage is a bit biased.

There are some languages, like C++, where the first place to go seeking answers isn't SO. C++ devs tend to look at http://en.cppreference.com (using an English locale in this example). To me, it tends to bias the sample towards the subset of developer population using SO, which would not be a representative sample size for a true population sampling in a statistical problem - it would be oversampled in one group to t…

I pretty much never go to SO first to seek answers... but I google for answers and find a SO post that's useful once or twice a week.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#206

Post by dkersten »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #11
falcolas wrote: post #2

Otherwise written as "what programming languages are being asked about late at night." To me, who rarely pulls up SO, correlating SO questions and page views with usage is a bit biased.

Whoah! The big news for me is that there is a programmer who rarely uses SO. I use it constantly. Can you say more about: 1. What your programming set up is. 2. What you do when there is an issue? I didn't know there was a reasonable alternative. I do the Google -> SO a lot. The only time Google brings up a different page is if the question is REALLY basic like how to use a function. Edit: added this postscript: I ha…

I don't really use SO that much. I mean, sure, I google for stuff and find answers on SO, but this isn't thaaaat common. Actually asking questions is very, very rare.

For #2, this is the most common google->SO for me, but typically this happens only when something very unexpected happens, which isn't that common. Typically, my problems are around what library/functions I need and that is usually solved through online reference material.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#207

Post by i336_ »

scalatohaskell wrote: post #192
falcolas wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest concern with this is that there are a lot of really terrible bash script writers out there on the internet, and the quality of code between two different answers will vary wildly. I'm not going to claim to be a great bash script writer, but I'm better than 80% of what I see out there. Throwing together random fragments is going to cause nearly as many problems as it's meant to solve.

This is very true, and it has happened to me. Luckily I dont write anything critical in bash, there are usually better suited people for that. I am just a big crybaby without compiler :(

Out of curiosity, what do you currently dislike about the shell, if anything?

I'm not setting up a "you hate the shell" statement here - hashing out gripes and dislikes can sometimes be a great way to jump straight into the middle of an iterative positive feedback loop of learning.

(Or at least I think so, anyway. I think that if I did that myself it would identify the (sometimes not intuitive) blocks and glitches I have with things more quickly than I figure them out in the end.)

Oh, also - note that there is a lot I outright hate about the shell myself, but which is due to its, shall way say, overly organic development over the last ~20 years.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#208

Post by xanton »

rz2k wrote: post #105
thewhitetulip wrote: post #22

I really do not understand how anyone could judge up which languages are being used at X time during the day or night based on stackoverflow. I rarely use stackoverflow (like once a few months), how do we factor in the data which we don't have in it? What's the accuracy of the current data? And how can we foem conclusion? The post should say, "What tags are used to ask questions on stackoverflow at night?" Because, a…

> I really do not understand how anyone... Someone contributing to an official Stack Overflow blog seems like a likely candidate! Sure, the conclusions are the result of a fishing expedition into the usage data for something to comment on, rather than something scientific that began with a question or tests a hypothesis. However, while the total number of questions isn't so meaningful, that is the denominator used to…

In most companies I worked for in Moscow they either don't have strict schedule or tend to shift work hours later in the day (usually 10am-19pm). I think the reason is that it's very uncomfortable to use public transportation during rush hours. Here is what I dealt with if I left home at 8am when I lived there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjkYStk6vjo

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#209

Post by driverdan »

s_kilk wrote: post #173
Morgawr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't use SO that much, I never have. Maybe I google a few things once in a while and sometimes I stumble upon a StackOverflow page, but never to actually solve errors. It's usually to get a bit more insight out of curiosity. Professionally, I work at Google and internally we have an extensive corpus of knowledge for various problems and programming patterns that really are tied to in-house technologies that d…

> I look at the logs, look at the code... This bears repeating. READ \ clap\ THE \ clap\ FUCK- \ clap\ -ING \ clap\ LOGS. READ \ clap\ THE \ clap\ FUCK- \ clap\ -ING \ clap\ CODE. I'm amazed at the devs who just scroll up in the logs to the first error they see, then copy-paste that into google or SO.

If the error is clear then sure, look at the code. Many people seem to be bad at writing user friendly error messages though, requiring a search for what the message even means.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#210

Post by gls2ro »

jswny wrote: post #132

This is cool but every time I see something like this I think that this kind of data could be seriously skewed by individual language communities. For example, in the Elixir community we have our own forum, IRC, and Slack channel. Because of this, I almost never visit SO for my Elixir needs. However, I do when I am working with JavaScript, C, Java, etc. I know other languages like C++ have similar communities which t…

From an outside (Elixir slack,irc) perspective sometimes I think these communities on Slack or IRC are "hiding" things from a beginner or at least making the search for an answer harder: because they are not indexed and when one searches for an answer one does not receive a link to a Slack conversation about that topic.

Personal example: I started to learn Elixir, but I don't know where are these communities. So I rely on SO or other open sources/articles on the web.

Post reply on HN