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What programming languages are used late at night?

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Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#71

Post by pjc50 »

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 use it rarely for questions, although I'm a big contributor to electronics.SO. 27k rep, #12 contributor this year. Much smaller community with even more brutal moderation.

Mostly I do Windows/MFC/C++ or embedded stuff these days, for which MSDN is sometimes more useful than SO (although unacceptably slow page load times!). Occasionally there is something with a search resistant name or where the usage examples don't help for which I need to go to SO.

For Windows CE, there is almost no user community. If the docs don't help and the (extremely fragmented) source doesn't help there's no option other than to give up or break out the debugger and reverse-engineer things. I found a bug in Microsoft's "structured exception handling" this way.

It's a lot more useful for C#, which I'm less experienced with.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#72

Post by Morgawr »

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 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 don't really exist outside of the company. That's mostly the #1 reason why I almost never stumble upon SO.

> 1. What your programming set up is.

I code in Python, Bash, Haskell and sometimes Go. Plus a couple of internal languages that aren't really interesting (mostly config languages). I write code with vim and manage my project with tmux sessions.

> 2. What you do when there is an issue?

I look at the logs, look at the code, I look internally for any resources we might have, I spend some time trying to figure out what is going on and usually that takes care of 90% of the problems. If that is not the case, then depending on the type of problem (is it an internal library? is it something externally available?) I either ask on the internal IRC for specific teams in charge of that platform, or I go to the external internet in search for help. Most of the time, if that is the case, the situation is so specific that I can't really find an relevant answer on SO so I more often than not just end up in a #freenode channel for that library/language and directly ask questions to the interested people.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#73

Post by falcolas »

soheil wrote: post #20
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.

I always feel guilty asking questions from coworkers when the answer literally takes me a fraction of the time if I Googled it and opened the first SO link.

IMO, if it's something that I'm asking a coworker about, SO isn't going to have an easy (or correct) answer.

For example, I am attempting to use a namespaced library installed with Pip in my Lambda function. It doesn't work - can't import the library. Google gives a bunch of noise. SO gives a bunch of noise.

The solution? Asked a coworker, got an answer back immediately. Import the 'site' package, and set up the current working directory as a site directory. This makes the library .pth files work properly.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#74

Post by marcosdumay »

NickM wrote: post #65
sotojuan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning Haskell has been made much easier with Haskell Book[1]. Unlike LYAH, it actually has a ton of exercises and in-depth explanations so you understand the why behind things as you make progress. That said, it requires discipline to read through. [1] http://haskellbook.com/

The big problem I've had with Haskell is that even after gaining a pretty good understanding of the language (including monads and such) I still can't fathom how to do anything real with it. Exercises are great and all, but once I try to go past exercises, I start getting lost in layers of monad transformers, and I struggle to figure out the "right" way to do anything. It just feels like there are all these layers of…

Try doing everything in IO, passing stuff around by hand and ignoring all that abstraction.

You will immediately spot some places where a monad will help you. Where that happens, use the monad, elsewhere, keep it simple. With time you will regret some of that simple code, when that happens, change it (Haskell's best use case is on refactoring). With even more time you'll get a taste for where it's good to go complex from the start.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#75

Post by pierrec »

>My final (and favorite) observation is that developers in Paris take the longest and most consistent lunch breaks. Well, if I lived in Paris, I would too.

A contributing factor might be that a lot of French companies include meal vouchers in their benefits. Generally employees are given the choice to deduce some amount from their payroll and get nearly double that amount in meal vouchers, because the vouchers are government-supported including a tax concession. You can use these at most restaurants in Paris.

You can, of course, use the vouchers to grab a sandwich anywhere and eat it in front of your code, but overall it encourages actual restaurant breaks, since you basically have more money specifically to spend on your lunch.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#76

Post by falcolas »

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…

Amen. Writing a bash script? Branch off a separate terminal and type `man bash`.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#77

Post by cstrahan »

FranOntanaya wrote: post #31
startupdiscuss wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my case the language's official reference is enough i.e. I know what I'm looking for just need to remember what it looked like. I end in SO sometimes when looking for some discussion on general concepts i.e. advantages of X over Y, but even then it's not always very helpful.

I've harped on too eagerly turning to SO elsewhere in this thread, but I have to agree with this:

> I end in SO sometimes when looking for some discussion on general concepts i.e. advantages of X over Y, but even then it's not always very helpful.

SO can be useful when what I'm curious about is more theoretical and/or subjective in nature, and thus can't be readily attained from regular reference material.

Here's an example where someone (quite helpfully) points out the connection between monoids and monads: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3870310

I knew the definition of monoid and monad, but what I lacked was enough intuition to (readily) see the connection on my own. It's much more convenient to borrow someone else's insight, rather than sit indefinitely meditating on the nature of a given problem. In those cases a resource like SO (or any other forum, for that matter) can be quite useful -- even if you've read up as much as you can.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#78

Post by evgen »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #49
thepratt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest player using Haskell would be Google.

Microsoft and Facebook are also using Haskell in production.

A huge chunk of the site integrity bits (e.g. general spam prevention and application of this technology to other problem spaces like instant messages, etc.) for Facebook are done in Haskell and if you know Haskell and fancy working in London I am fairly certain that team is always on the lookout for new people.

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#79

Post by startupdiscuss »

unit91 wrote: post #53
startupdiscuss wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, when there is nothing to look up, I guess you won't look something up. But those would not effect the results. Presumably a good C# programmer uses less documentation just as much as a good Haskell programmer.

Warning: anecdotes and small sample sizes ahead. True, but most people I've bumped into who write C# do it professionally, and have built up a body of knowledge. By contrast, most people I know (including me) who have messed around with Haskell, have...messed around with Haskell. I could be way off here, but I'd guess that there is a smaller percentage of mature Haskell programmers within the Haskell community than m…

I accept your view on haskell and C# distinction. I have the same view.

But that doesn't mean C# users would look things up on SO more from 9-5 than they would after 5.

We are talking about the same people.

(The study, I assume, shows that people use C# for work and Haskell for a hobby.)

Re: What programming languages are used late at night?

#80

Post by Jtsummers »

phowat wrote: post #54
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.

I'd hate to be your coworker. You ought to Google your issues before interrupting someone else's flow.

If I wasn't willing to answer my coworkers questions, I'd consider myself a bad colleague. It would be annoying if people came up to my desk constantly, but they usually send out an email or IM [EDIT] or catch me away from the desk, like in the break room. It's less distracting from a flow perspective (potentially not distracting if those notifications aren't immediately visible). Related, without getting these questions from colleagues I can't know, no one can know, what institutional knowledge we're lacking. I was surprised (sort of) by how deficient my coworkers were with git, until I realized I was one of 3 folks here who do any hobby programming and so had used git on my own time before we adopted it internally on some projects. I'm glad I know that they don't know, because we were able to put together a training course of sorts to bring them up to speed. This has helped with new hires as well. This makes us, as an office, much more effective than if we'd left it to individuals to google for answers (though it may be quicker in the short term, it doesn't help in the long term because they still don't understand the problems they face and the systems they use).
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