Now that I think of it, apples are vastly more important to me than Apple products.
There are the blossoms in spring. The early kinds in August--September: Transparent Blanche, then Gyllenkrok Astrakan, Safstaholm. Later James Grieve, Aroma and many others. In October--November the nameless bitter kind which only grows in my home village and is good for baking in the oven with syrup. And finally, the apples which last into winter: Ingrid Marie, Cox Orange, Gloster.
The many forms and uses of apples is a small miracle. And yes, it's technology of a kind.
I never liked that newfangled vim. It's far too... colorful. I usually swap it out for nvi, which is much more vi-like. Distributions (like Redhat) that install pico as the default editor make me punch someone. Maybe the guy who thought pico should be considered in any way an acceptable UNIX editor. I always have to swear, abort back to the command line, and export VISUAL=vi.
Debian does this too (installs nano by default as a newbie-friendly always-works editor).
If you're the admin, the right way to solve it is to uninstall pico.
I'm an Emacs user, but if you're serious about using Unix you need to be able to handle some simple editing using vi --
sooner or later you're stuck with a system which has nothing else.
I think what you're seeing is more a result of your specific field of study than a general decline. You're in IT, and techies don't give two shits about their writing.
I do.
Half my work (as a programmer) is communication.
If I cannot or won't communicate my ideas clearly, my code is in a kind of zombie state: it moves, but noone can interact with it. Eventually someone will step up and shoot it in the head.
Parents are the biggest part of the problem On the one hand, a shockingly large percentage of recent immigrants come from cultures where education is not important - enough education to earn a bit more than minimum wage is fine (and, in some cases it seems, is preferable because if the kid does better than the father, the father feels inadequate).
That's not new, and is not limited to recent immigrants. A few years ago my son became the first member of my wife's side of the family to graduate from college. They've been in America since the 1800s, and were mostly farmers, laborers, and the occasional missionary. The most education of any of his antecedents on that side had was a trade school degree. Many had dropped out from primary school at an early age in order to work the family farms. College educations were not encouraged - my mother-in-law was valedictorian, yet her formal education ended at high school. Even my wife's desire to go to a technical college was not encouraged. Her family even chided me when we were dating her because I was a "college boy". Sadly, I don't think their situation is all that unusual in rural America.
That has always existed, yes.
But in parallel with that has been the idea that "the kids should get a real education so they don't end up with a crap job like mine".
What if 50% of the working class families reasoned that way in the past, and much fewer of the OP's "recent immigrants" do now?
(My own background is farmers/working class, although in a different country from yours. Dad left school at thirteen. Happily, noone discouraged me from going to university; I guess it was obvious that I was useless for manual labor...
And anyway there was this idea of education as a good thing in general.)
I always appreciate a GUI and messages translated in my mother tongue when available and I consider this should be encouraged as much as possible. It's not that difficult to show respect to others.
Are you seriously saying everyone should translate everything to every language, that it's *easy* to do so, and that you're *disrespectful* if you don't?
Let's think about this. They're looking at expanding an anti-child porn blacklist to include animal porn and "violent" porn. Unless they're referring to young animals or violence against kids, this is no longer a child porn issue. At this point it's just a matter of a block being put in place because the subject matter offends someone using the umbrella of "think of the children".
No it's not. They argue that animal porn is animal abuse.
(If the discussion goes in Finland like it does in Sweden.)
At some point in the past decade, people fucking sheep went from being harmless weirdos to a menace to society... It's unclear to me how it happened, although the wave of horse mutilation may have something to do with it.
I've been a professional programmer for ~15 years now; What you've said here strikes me as fairly odd.
Yeah. I can't help wondering if he's sincere.
Object Oriented Programming is nothing mystical. "Associate methods with your data structures by type." There's half of it. "Now inherit the methods in subtypes." There's the other half of it.
The first one is very natural, and I can't believe it's because my brain is wired in an odd way. It's the abstract datatype:
"Here's the language with its fixed set of general-purpose types. And here's how I can create my own application-specific types and use them in the same way as the builtin ones."
The second part feels much less natural, but fortunately it's also less rarely useful. When people go crazy with inheritance (and too many do) it can indeed be messy. But so what? People write crap code regardless of paradigm.
"I don't know anyone who just uses vi anymore either. Most use vim"
I think its fair to say that "vi" and "vim" are interchangable names these days and have been for about a decade.
I use vi, but I don't use vim.
Not for longer editing sessions, but when I'm root, or logged into some small embedded system.
I also use the vi which comes with Solaris (the one that will refuse to start if your terminal is too wide) because noone has bothered to install a decent editor on those machines.
I remember those halcyon days when Java had just emerged, acorn like if you will, from Oak. It promised a brave new world of write once, run anywhere programming that was to usher in a wonderful alternative to all that dangerous mucking about with C++ and flatten the disparate paradigms of software development from Microsoft, Apple and others. I went to trade shows and conferences with like minded souls all excited about this Next Big Thing. Hell, I even bought books and marvelled how easy it was to get Duke to cartwheel on any OS with a JVM.
I was there too in the late 1990s. My company was C/Unix-oriented, and Java looked like a nice upgrade for a few months.
Then I found that I couldn't get a free Java interpreter for my Linux box; that I couldn't write a standard Unix getopt(3) parser; that C++ had better data structures for vectors, linked lists and search trees... and I passed on Java.
But it didn't stop there. It then carved out of the psyches of beleaguered programmers the world over a new level of hell just for itself.
It turned into a platform.
You already had Windows programmers and Unix programmers who didn't talk to each other; now you had Java programmers too.
Submodules are a total pain in the arse. Git's achilles heel is definitely large projects and they need to be broken up some how though.
So far what I've seen is people breaking up projects in tiny little bits for no good reason, creating extra work and complexity.
Look at Linux; it's just one repository, and Linux is large.
Another failing of git is for storing binaries where the project just bloats and bloats. If we were talking of a centralised repo, perhaps that wouldn't matter so much, it's *everyone's* clone that bloats and if you want a working clone, you have to clone everything, not just a snapshot. It means it's a really bad idea to store frequently changing binary files in git.
Apart from graphics work, when would you ever want to do that? (People checking in their generated executables deserve the pain, IMO. So do the ones who try to use MS Word for serious work.)
Where I work even uses CVS to commit nightly test results and thanks to the general craptitude of CVS they get away with it because it only ever holds a copy of the latest committed binary.
I never understood what's so crappy about not storing a lot of crud.
I use CVS and Git, and I regularly use both without access to the central repository. Git is nice in many ways, but the "I can do everything disconnected" feature is vastly overrated.
Once upon a time I worked for a department that managed its own email, and hence had it's own domain. Someone had the bright idea of consolidating to just use the central email solution in the interest of saving time/money, in spite of the fact that managing mail took very little time and very little money.
Not to mention foo@bar.example.com doesn't mean that you cannot have central functions like virus scanning/spam filtering if you see a need for it.
Is there an actual requirement for everyone to be @domain.com, or is someone just empire building?
But we want everyone to feel they are part of ONE BIG FAMILY!
Seriously, I work in an organization with tens of thousands of people as foo@example.com.
It's unnatural and annoying; in practice I want to know who I'm talking to and where they are in the organization -- not in detail, but I need to know if they are among the few hundreds close to me.
Likewise, I imagine Physics students wouldn't mind having a different mail domain from the students of Semitic languages. Perhaps they would even have a need for a real Unix mail server for cron job output and so on.
... and don't even use names. Issue them a number or nonsense sequence of characters like most big companies do.
The big international company I work for does this, but without the nonsense. You get a seven-character user name assigned to you.
This seems to be a human-assisted process, because it's based on your name. Usually it is semi-pronouncable and makes sense.
These names are used for user accounts of all kinds but (unfortunately) not for mail addresses since they did the disastrous migration from standard Unix mail to MS Exchange in the nineties.
It's a rather nice system; you tend to remember the user names of people you work with, because they show up in everything from ls(1) to trouble tickets, wiki entries and commit messages.
Some people are better known by their user names than by their given names; they are used even in conversations.
I must be doing something wrong or GUI toolkits these days aren't designed as well for X forwarding
Quite frequently. Many of the problems which modern replacements of venerable older parts of GNU/Linux are being designed to solve are caused not by bad tools but by people who don't know how to use them.
X11 is neither GNU nor Linux; it began as another lump of free software...
but apart from that, +1.
Back in the 1990s, it was understood that X11 programming had an network efficiency aspect. For example, forcing a network roundtrip for some common user-level operation was considered bad, because N*x milliseconds can easily become a long time.
I regularly eat 100% horse meat burger and I like it better than beef actually.
When I was a kid, and before we had McDonalds and stuff, as far as I knew hamburgers were supposed to be made from horse meat. Did this change somewhere along the line? (Yes, I'm aware that there aren't enough horses in the world to supply the hamburger restaurants of today.)
Yes. Almost all good programmers I know had one of those, or an Amiga. I'm biased, but it seems to me that younger people who grew up when PCs were available to home users, are more likely to be good if they have lived in a time capsule and owned some older machine.
You had to understand the machine just to use it.
Part of it might be that there wasn't a lot to do.
You could play the (pirated) games you had, but when you were bored with them you couldn't turn to Facebook. The only other thing these machines were good for was hacking them.
assembly programmers probably know more about how a computer works than either one of us, in fact I always raise an eyebrow when I hear older techs talking about motherboard processes in the form of IO & voltage rather than clock speeds & bridges
That's not assembly programming, though.
Assembly is just another programming language, and doesn't teach you anything about voltage.
And more Sharepoint? We use Sharepoint at work, and everyone hates it. We're currently looking at finding a suitable replacement.
Isn't just about *anything* a suitable replacement for Sharepoint?
Where I work it's used as a cruel and unfair parody of a wiki, so MediaWiki is one obvious replacement.
Another replacement would be, I guess, a version control system like Git.
If that is causing your software to crash or to start have issues then STOP PROGRAMMING! Proper programming prevents those kind of issues. I'm not saying that you shouldn't test for this kind of issue but if you program properly in the first place a date overflow wont crash your software. You tend to see this kind of error with Object Oriented programmers, a good C programmer will have handled this before it happened.
A good programmer would have handled it, period.
As others have mentioned, there are very few excuses to handle time as anything but an offset from epoch.
It's no different in the object-oriented languages I know.
I have worked with a few great coders that had style that drove me up the wall. Although I might dislike their style of doing things, I would be the first to say they are top notch coders because their code was elegant, simple, robust, extensible, scalable, etc.
Huh? Quite literally: what's not to like?
I can't think of one more reasonable thing to ask for except maybe performance. I assume "simple" includes "simple to interface with", i.e. clean, documented interfaces.
If other programmers can not understand it, then it's bad.
Not always.
I've often worked with people so dumb/lazy/undereducated that they couldn't understand normal-level code in whatever language and environment we were using.
Dumbing it down for their benefit would guarantee that the situation would never improve; average to smart programmers would stay away and so on.
There are techniques which are *too* clever or *too* bleeding-edge, but there are others which have to be understood.
For example mild C++ template usage: probably too bleeding edge in 2002, but not optional to understand today if you're doing work in that language.
Unless he's making your own job a lot harder or you're his boss (or project manager), it's not your place.
Ah, another Slashdot cynic of the
"you are unimportant, your work is worthless, and you should just grab the money with as little effort as possible" school.
*Of course* it's his place to help his neighbor to improve. Without that we're just animals.
Can he do anything useful in this situation?
That's another question, and the OP doesn't give any real clues. I get the impression he may want to vent more than anything else.
Here in Sweden, the tradition is to watch Dinner For One (on TV every year since 1976), get very drunk and then watch fireworks (or set them off yourself and get your fingers blown off if you're drunk enough).
I missed Dinner for One this year, and was rather happy about it. After 30+ viewings it has lost its charm.
My family tradition is otherwise TV-based. Zap around between the plentiful movies, while drinking some coffee and/or gleuhwein. Around 23.30, switch to channel 1 to watch the celebration in Stockholm. Also glance out the window, to see if some sucker has spent so much money on fireworks that they are actually worth watching. Then at midnight, make a few phone calls and go to bed.
Fireworks at New Year are rather new around here, by the way. They used to be reserved for Easter, but at some point in the 1980s or so they started selling in December too.
Slashdot Mirror
The many forms and uses of apples is a small miracle. And yes, it's technology of a kind.
I never liked that newfangled vim. It's far too... colorful. I usually swap it out for nvi, which is much more vi-like. Distributions (like Redhat) that install pico as the default editor make me punch someone. Maybe the guy who thought pico should be considered in any way an acceptable UNIX editor. I always have to swear, abort back to the command line, and export VISUAL=vi.
Debian does this too (installs nano by default as a newbie-friendly always-works editor). If you're the admin, the right way to solve it is to uninstall pico.
I'm an Emacs user, but if you're serious about using Unix you need to be able to handle some simple editing using vi -- sooner or later you're stuck with a system which has nothing else.
I think what you're seeing is more a result of your specific field of study than a general decline. You're in IT, and techies don't give two shits about their writing.
I do. Half my work (as a programmer) is communication. If I cannot or won't communicate my ideas clearly, my code is in a kind of zombie state: it moves, but noone can interact with it. Eventually someone will step up and shoot it in the head.
Parents are the biggest part of the problem On the one hand, a shockingly large percentage of recent immigrants come from cultures where education is not important - enough education to earn a bit more than minimum wage is fine (and, in some cases it seems, is preferable because if the kid does better than the father, the father feels inadequate).
That's not new, and is not limited to recent immigrants. A few years ago my son became the first member of my wife's side of the family to graduate from college. They've been in America since the 1800s, and were mostly farmers, laborers, and the occasional missionary. The most education of any of his antecedents on that side had was a trade school degree. Many had dropped out from primary school at an early age in order to work the family farms. College educations were not encouraged - my mother-in-law was valedictorian, yet her formal education ended at high school. Even my wife's desire to go to a technical college was not encouraged. Her family even chided me when we were dating her because I was a "college boy". Sadly, I don't think their situation is all that unusual in rural America.
That has always existed, yes. But in parallel with that has been the idea that "the kids should get a real education so they don't end up with a crap job like mine". What if 50% of the working class families reasoned that way in the past, and much fewer of the OP's "recent immigrants" do now?
(My own background is farmers/working class, although in a different country from yours. Dad left school at thirteen. Happily, noone discouraged me from going to university; I guess it was obvious that I was useless for manual labor ...
And anyway there was this idea of education as a good thing in general.)
I always appreciate a GUI and messages translated in my mother tongue when available and I consider this should be encouraged as much as possible. It's not that difficult to show respect to others.
Are you seriously saying everyone should translate everything to every language, that it's *easy* to do so, and that you're *disrespectful* if you don't?
Let's think about this. They're looking at expanding an anti-child porn blacklist to include animal porn and "violent" porn. Unless they're referring to young animals or violence against kids, this is no longer a child porn issue. At this point it's just a matter of a block being put in place because the subject matter offends someone using the umbrella of "think of the children".
No it's not. They argue that animal porn is animal abuse. (If the discussion goes in Finland like it does in Sweden.) At some point in the past decade, people fucking sheep went from being harmless weirdos to a menace to society ... It's unclear to me how it happened, although the wave of horse mutilation may have something to do with it.
I've been a professional programmer for ~15 years now; What you've said here strikes me as fairly odd.
Yeah. I can't help wondering if he's sincere.
Object Oriented Programming is nothing mystical. "Associate methods with your data structures by type." There's half of it. "Now inherit the methods in subtypes." There's the other half of it.
The first one is very natural, and I can't believe it's because my brain is wired in an odd way. It's the abstract datatype: "Here's the language with its fixed set of general-purpose types. And here's how I can create my own application-specific types and use them in the same way as the builtin ones."
The second part feels much less natural, but fortunately it's also less rarely useful. When people go crazy with inheritance (and too many do) it can indeed be messy. But so what? People write crap code regardless of paradigm.
"I don't know anyone who just uses vi anymore either. Most use vim"
I think its fair to say that "vi" and "vim" are interchangable names these days and have been for about a decade.
I use vi, but I don't use vim. Not for longer editing sessions, but when I'm root, or logged into some small embedded system. I also use the vi which comes with Solaris (the one that will refuse to start if your terminal is too wide) because noone has bothered to install a decent editor on those machines.
I remember those halcyon days when Java had just emerged, acorn like if you will, from Oak. It promised a brave new world of write once, run anywhere programming that was to usher in a wonderful alternative to all that dangerous mucking about with C++ and flatten the disparate paradigms of software development from Microsoft, Apple and others. I went to trade shows and conferences with like minded souls all excited about this Next Big Thing. Hell, I even bought books and marvelled how easy it was to get Duke to cartwheel on any OS with a JVM.
I was there too in the late 1990s. My company was C/Unix-oriented, and Java looked like a nice upgrade for a few months.
Then I found that I couldn't get a free Java interpreter for my Linux box; that I couldn't write a standard Unix getopt(3) parser; that C++ had better data structures for vectors, linked lists and search trees ... and I passed on Java.
But it didn't stop there. It then carved out of the psyches of beleaguered programmers the world over a new level of hell just for itself.
It turned into a platform. You already had Windows programmers and Unix programmers who didn't talk to each other; now you had Java programmers too.
Submodules are a total pain in the arse. Git's achilles heel is definitely large projects and they need to be broken up some how though.
So far what I've seen is people breaking up projects in tiny little bits for no good reason, creating extra work and complexity. Look at Linux; it's just one repository, and Linux is large.
Another failing of git is for storing binaries where the project just bloats and bloats. If we were talking of a centralised repo, perhaps that wouldn't matter so much, it's *everyone's* clone that bloats and if you want a working clone, you have to clone everything, not just a snapshot. It means it's a really bad idea to store frequently changing binary files in git.
Apart from graphics work, when would you ever want to do that? (People checking in their generated executables deserve the pain, IMO. So do the ones who try to use MS Word for serious work.)
Where I work even uses CVS to commit nightly test results and thanks to the general craptitude of CVS they get away with it because it only ever holds a copy of the latest committed binary.
I never understood what's so crappy about not storing a lot of crud. I use CVS and Git, and I regularly use both without access to the central repository. Git is nice in many ways, but the "I can do everything disconnected" feature is vastly overrated.
Once upon a time I worked for a department that managed its own email, and hence had it's own domain. Someone had the bright idea of consolidating to just use the central email solution in the interest of saving time/money, in spite of the fact that managing mail took very little time and very little money.
Not to mention foo@bar.example.com doesn't mean that you cannot have central functions like virus scanning/spam filtering if you see a need for it.
Is there an actual requirement for everyone to be @domain.com, or is someone just empire building?
But we want everyone to feel they are part of ONE BIG FAMILY!
Seriously, I work in an organization with tens of thousands of people as foo@example.com. It's unnatural and annoying; in practice I want to know who I'm talking to and where they are in the organization -- not in detail, but I need to know if they are among the few hundreds close to me. Likewise, I imagine Physics students wouldn't mind having a different mail domain from the students of Semitic languages. Perhaps they would even have a need for a real Unix mail server for cron job output and so on.
... and don't even use names. Issue them a number or nonsense sequence of characters like most big companies do.
The big international company I work for does this, but without the nonsense. You get a seven-character user name assigned to you. This seems to be a human-assisted process, because it's based on your name. Usually it is semi-pronouncable and makes sense. These names are used for user accounts of all kinds but (unfortunately) not for mail addresses since they did the disastrous migration from standard Unix mail to MS Exchange in the nineties.
It's a rather nice system; you tend to remember the user names of people you work with, because they show up in everything from ls(1) to trouble tickets, wiki entries and commit messages. Some people are better known by their user names than by their given names; they are used even in conversations.
... nibbling away at Perl on the web front, and that bash is, for some reason, eating Perl's lunch in the sysadmin/code-glue areas.
Makes sense. Shell scripts make better glue than Perl (or Python or anything else), and with bash you have a powerful and stable shell language.
Perl is still the best sed/awk replacement though. I use it heavily, in standalone programs and as one-liners, for text processing.
I must be doing something wrong or GUI toolkits these days aren't designed as well for X forwarding
Quite frequently. Many of the problems which modern replacements of venerable older parts of GNU/Linux are being designed to solve are caused not by bad tools but by people who don't know how to use them.
X11 is neither GNU nor Linux; it began as another lump of free software ...
but apart from that, +1.
Back in the 1990s, it was understood that X11 programming had an network efficiency aspect. For example, forcing a network roundtrip for some common user-level operation was considered bad, because N*x milliseconds can easily become a long time.
I regularly eat 100% horse meat burger and I like it better than beef actually.
When I was a kid, and before we had McDonalds and stuff, as far as I knew hamburgers were supposed to be made from horse meat. Did this change somewhere along the line? (Yes, I'm aware that there aren't enough horses in the world to supply the hamburger restaurants of today.)
Oh and I remember seeing a talk from one of the main Github developers some time ago and he kept saying "fuck" all the time like Beavis & Butthead.
I can't recall either Beavis or Butthead ever saying "fuck" ...
It was a C64.
Yes. Almost all good programmers I know had one of those, or an Amiga. I'm biased, but it seems to me that younger people who grew up when PCs were available to home users, are more likely to be good if they have lived in a time capsule and owned some older machine.
You had to understand the machine just to use it.
Part of it might be that there wasn't a lot to do. You could play the (pirated) games you had, but when you were bored with them you couldn't turn to Facebook. The only other thing these machines were good for was hacking them.
assembly programmers probably know more about how a computer works than either one of us, in fact I always raise an eyebrow when I hear older techs talking about motherboard processes in the form of IO & voltage rather than clock speeds & bridges
That's not assembly programming, though. Assembly is just another programming language, and doesn't teach you anything about voltage.
How about just using Linux file permissions? Keep daddy's movies in his home folder
Or better in a directory only readable to people in the "grownups" group.
And more Sharepoint? We use Sharepoint at work, and everyone hates it. We're currently looking at finding a suitable replacement.
Isn't just about *anything* a suitable replacement for Sharepoint? Where I work it's used as a cruel and unfair parody of a wiki, so MediaWiki is one obvious replacement. Another replacement would be, I guess, a version control system like Git.
If that is causing your software to crash or to start have issues then STOP PROGRAMMING! Proper programming prevents those kind of issues. I'm not saying that you shouldn't test for this kind of issue but if you program properly in the first place a date overflow wont crash your software. You tend to see this kind of error with Object Oriented programmers, a good C programmer will have handled this before it happened.
A good programmer would have handled it, period. As others have mentioned, there are very few excuses to handle time as anything but an offset from epoch. It's no different in the object-oriented languages I know.
I have worked with a few great coders that had style that drove me up the wall. Although I might dislike their style of doing things, I would be the first to say they are top notch coders because their code was elegant, simple, robust, extensible, scalable, etc.
Huh? Quite literally: what's not to like? I can't think of one more reasonable thing to ask for except maybe performance. I assume "simple" includes "simple to interface with", i.e. clean, documented interfaces.
If other programmers can not understand it, then it's bad.
Not always. I've often worked with people so dumb/lazy/undereducated that they couldn't understand normal-level code in whatever language and environment we were using. Dumbing it down for their benefit would guarantee that the situation would never improve; average to smart programmers would stay away and so on.
There are techniques which are *too* clever or *too* bleeding-edge, but there are others which have to be understood. For example mild C++ template usage: probably too bleeding edge in 2002, but not optional to understand today if you're doing work in that language.
Unless he's making your own job a lot harder or you're his boss (or project manager), it's not your place.
Ah, another Slashdot cynic of the "you are unimportant, your work is worthless, and you should just grab the money with as little effort as possible" school.
*Of course* it's his place to help his neighbor to improve. Without that we're just animals.
Can he do anything useful in this situation? That's another question, and the OP doesn't give any real clues. I get the impression he may want to vent more than anything else.
Here in Sweden, the tradition is to watch Dinner For One (on TV every year since 1976), get very drunk and then watch fireworks (or set them off yourself and get your fingers blown off if you're drunk enough).
I missed Dinner for One this year, and was rather happy about it. After 30+ viewings it has lost its charm.
My family tradition is otherwise TV-based. Zap around between the plentiful movies, while drinking some coffee and/or gleuhwein. Around 23.30, switch to channel 1 to watch the celebration in Stockholm. Also glance out the window, to see if some sucker has spent so much money on fireworks that they are actually worth watching. Then at midnight, make a few phone calls and go to bed.
Fireworks at New Year are rather new around here, by the way. They used to be reserved for Easter, but at some point in the 1980s or so they started selling in December too.