Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers • Hacker News Board

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#331

Post by pas » Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 9:30 PM UTC

sofandsoc wrote: post #111

As people are mentioning a lack of Linux knowledge; is there a good course on this? two things; - I think it boils down to people not having 'poked around'. I grew up on DOS / early windows, when messing about, learning commands, configuration files was needed to install and run games (or new hardware). New game, new challenge. This learning process was part of the use of a computer to me. It gave me enough confidenc…

There might be good courses, aaaaand there was a pretty decent hands-on series linked recently here (or on reddit, or ... somewhere! and I can't find it now, sorry :/ )

That said, as the sibling comment by sanitycheck mentioned, start using it. WSL2 is pretty okay.

Oracle is heavily promoting its cloud services by offering a pretty beefy free tier (24GB RAM, 4 vCPU aarch64, 200GB SSD, +1 IPv4 address)

I'd start with self-hosting a bunch of stuff. Just for fun. Whatever interests you. Try things with and without Docker. Write a Dockerfile, build it, run it. Write a systemd unit file, enable it, start it, stop it, disable it, mask it, etc.

Buying a (second hand?) laptop and installing Linux on it instantly provides a ton of interesting challenges. Which distribution? Which version of the distribution? How to partition the disk? Encrypt my files? Only my home dir or full-disk encryption?

Try KDE, try Gnome, try Xfce. Try Ubuntu. Try Arch (because it's hype, also it's a rolling distro, also pacman - its package manager - is pretty nice) ... I don't like RedHat-based distros, but ... millions do. Who knows, maybe you'll like it. (Try Fedora.)

Okay, you set up your Linux desktop. For you it's definitely the Year of the Linux Desktop. Congratulations! You're irrevocably one of us now. (I'm typing this on a shitty Windows 10 laptop, while a feet away a newer, but even worse Win11 laptop sleeps and ... I've been using Win10/11 on my big "dev" box for years (for playing 5+ year old games, obviously) ... but ! finally got fed up with BSODs and ~6 weeks ago I've installed Linux on it again ... then I moved and it's still in a box in storage :(((( )

Oh, yeah, this reminds me. Try Wine! Definitely try Lutris. (StarCraft II is free now, works great on Wine.)

... also, ask questions! (There's even a guide for asking questions! http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html Oh this reminds me of the howtos. So backin the day there was this https://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html :) before youtube videos took over.)

That's it! Absolutely nothing else. No need to learn shell scripting, no need to open the terminal, no need to know just enough python to be dangerous. No need to know what's DKMS, nvidia drivers will just work. Everything just works! Bluetooth headsets and network printers too!

(ps. I lied, sorry!)

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#332

Post by listenallyall » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 12:13 AM UTC

kwhitefoot wrote: post #327

listenallyall wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you've done that, is it all of a sudden super-simple? You've had to incorporate all the same complexity into your model. If you sent it back to a spreadsheet user, don't you think they would say the same thing, just backwards?: "I had to reverse engineer a number of technical data processes in R that took days merely to understand the principles..."

Perhaps not super simple but it will have been broken down into named parts. In the days before spreadsheets were as capable as they are now I worked with plenty of quite old engineers who would write Fortran instead; their Fortran was always better than the spreadsheets that they later produced.

The degree something is well-designed and comprehensible is based mostly on the developer, not the tool. A spreadsheet with named ranges/tables, cell comments (sparsely, where necessary), clearly-defined tabs, etc can make debugging or reverse-engineering a breeze. The visual aspect of Excel can also help debugging immensely, i.e. conditional formatting of cells failing validation, filtering to isolate subsets of data, etc.

I will certainly agree that it is quite rare to come across a spreadsheet that is perfectly-organized, on the other hand a ton of developers write horrible spaghetti-code too. Further, a 10+ year-old spreadsheet will open right up in Excel... while a 10+ year-old data project is often written in a language you've never used before (or hoped you'd never use again).

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#333

Post by crdrost » Mon, Mar 20, 2023, 3:35 PM UTC

MrPatan wrote: post #102

crdrost wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I want to emphasize those aspects. • Excel is based on a simpler model of computation, something like the unification ideas in logic programming, state is not named and minimally expressive, etc. You want a looping construct? Better autofill a column or something! • Excel automatically includes printf-style debugging of every object in the system; that is the default state of the system and you have to hide col…

Ima stop you right there and ask how you made the bullet points. • Is it just a pasted character? * Is it a markdown thing? * Is it?

I was on my mobile, I think the keyboard is Gboard, you have a symbol keyboard with two pages and the second page has the bullet.

Also if I long press on the bullet I can choose among •♣♠♪♥♦, which I find to be a hilarious random assortment...

Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

#334

Post by CWuestefeld » Tue, Mar 21, 2023, 2:51 AM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #283

CWuestefeld wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always used Android phones, but my company recently stopped supporting them and told me they have to issue me a new phone - this time an iPhone. And I'm utterly lost. At one time, Apple was said to be the high priests of user experience, with intuitive interactions that would just work the way you expect. This seems to have fallen by the wayside, pushed out by making it more sophisticated I suppose. Because thin…

Double tap the home button and it brings up the app selection screen. Took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out some years back.

Home button? My iphone doesn't seem to have a home button. The way I've gotten to the home screen is by a gesture flinging upwards from the bottom.