Programmers then and now
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Hey now. Searching stack overflow circia 2011 to 2018 was an Art. You had to know enough to find the correct question that wasn't deleted because a mod thought it was a duplicate of another question
Also to find the actual correct answer three comments down because the one that was voted highest worked, but was actually a really shit way to do the thing being asked
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I’ve never understood why people are so intimidated by tar
It is "backwards" from some other commands --- usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).
That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.
And the icing on the cake is that I don't use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least...).
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Also to find the actual correct answer three comments down because the one that was voted highest worked, but was actually a really shit way to do the thing being asked
I often found the correct answers in the comments of an answer
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I once had an intern attempt to install sudo using NPM and when that didn't work he asked ChatGPT "Why can't I install sudo from NPM?" while I'm trying to explain it to him.
He was smart, but somehow knew very little about commercial computers despite being on the verge of getting his master's in computer science.
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One of my favourite game dev stories from the 1980s is the story of Elite. It was a game people thought couldn't be made. Most devs thought hardware wasn't powerful enough and publishers thought it wouldn't be fun enough.
It was one of the first properly 3D open world video games ever made. I think when it released it sold nearly as many copies as there were home computers that could run it.
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
There's a fantastic video about it here: https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I
the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape
Holy hell, that is OLD old. We're talking about the beginnings of digital time here. Had the first web constellations formed yet? How fast did you crank your CPU?
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I once had a junior calling me in a panic because he didn't know how to quit nano. NANO!
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I’ve never understood why people are so intimidated by tar
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I got tired of looking up the options for each possible combination of archiving + compression, so today I have a "magic" bash function that can extract almost any format.
Then for compressing, I only use
zip, which doesn't need any args other than the archive name and the thing you're compressing. It needs-rwhen recursing on dirs, but unlike "eXtract" and "Ze", that's a good mnemonic. -
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80s programmers hated Unix, btw. Look up Unix Haters Handbook, it's a free and funny read
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I once had a junior calling me in a panic because he didn't know how to quit nano. NANO!
Nano... Like... The one that has all the keybinds permanently shown at the bottom of the screen?
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I once had a junior calling me in a panic because he didn't know how to quit nano. NANO!
That deserves a "do you know how to read?", because the exit command is on the lower part of the screen for nano
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tar -eXtract Ze Vucking File
Nobody wants to deliberately use the wrong compression type when extracting, so modern tar will figure out the compression itself if you just point it at a file. So
tar -xf filenameworks on almost anything. You don't need to remember which flag to use on a.tar.bz2file and which one for a.tar.xzfile. -
the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape
Holy hell, that is OLD old. We're talking about the beginnings of digital time here. Had the first web constellations formed yet? How fast did you crank your CPU?
You couldn't crank your CPU in the olden days, it'd make games run in fast forward.
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Nobody wants to deliberately use the wrong compression type when extracting, so modern tar will figure out the compression itself if you just point it at a file. So
tar -xf filenameworks on almost anything. You don't need to remember which flag to use on a.tar.bz2file and which one for a.tar.xzfile.That doesn't give me a memorable mnemonic though.
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It is "backwards" from some other commands --- usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).
That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.
And the icing on the cake is that I don't use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least...).
I almost never create a tarball, so I have to look up the syntax for that. Which is as simple as
man tar. But as far as extracting it almost couldn't be easier,tar xf <tarball>and call it a day. Or if you want to list the contents without extracting,tar tf <tarball>. Unless you're using an ancient version of tar, it will detect and handle whatever compression format you're using without you having to remember if you needzorJor whatever. -
That doesn't give me a memorable mnemonic though.
tar -eXtract File
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the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape
Holy hell, that is OLD old. We're talking about the beginnings of digital time here. Had the first web constellations formed yet? How fast did you crank your CPU?
Yeah, I played it a lot, and a similar one called aviator which was a kinda flight sim. There wasn't really much of an internet back then but stuff was easy to copy on tapes.
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My experience is that the programmers from the first row very much still exist. My theory is that the number of programmers from the first row stayed the about same or even increased slightly. There are so many more so called "programmers" overall now, however, that in relation the first row programmers are much rarer now. And to be fair, you don't need a programmer capable of programming entire games in assembly to center a div.
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Nano... Like... The one that has all the keybinds permanently shown at the bottom of the screen?
Onscreen instructions unclear, pressed Shift+6+X. Still stuck in Nano.
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My experience is that the programmers from the first row very much still exist. My theory is that the number of programmers from the first row stayed the about same or even increased slightly. There are so many more so called "programmers" overall now, however, that in relation the first row programmers are much rarer now. And to be fair, you don't need a programmer capable of programming entire games in assembly to center a div.
And vice versa, you don’t need to know how to centre a div to create a game in assembler. I’m comfortable using pointers and managing memory, but don’t ask me to do anything with web UI.
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And vice versa, you don’t need to know how to centre a div to create a game in assembler. I’m comfortable using pointers and managing memory, but don’t ask me to do anything with web UI.
I'm guessing that someone who figured out how to keep a high score box centered on screen using assembly will figure it out to do it with CSS.
The reverse, not so much...
