It's time for another teacher story. So grab a cup of tea and listen.

We were casually talking about Arduino programming because he told me he teaches this in another class.
Teacher: it's so sad that i can't use my java code on the Arduino. I mean the Arduino uses java so there shouldn't be a problem.
Me: *internal* HOLD THE FUCK ON
Me: you know that the Arduino uses c and not java, do you?
Teacher: but the Arduino can do java commands! How do you explain this!?
Me: because java uses the c-syntax and it's more of a coincidence that they're named the same way?
Teacher: huh. Ok. But C# doesn't use it, am i right?

How can someone this dumb be a programming teacher 🤦

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

Has anyone else noticed how hostile Stack Overflow has become? I was up at 4 am the other night (or I guess technically morning) and I was too tired to think straight so I posted a question about a syntax error I had and went to bed.

By the time I woke up I had 3 down votes and 2 comments saying how dumb this question was yet not a single answer.

Today on "How the Fuck is Python a Real Language?": Lambda functions and other dumb Python syntax.

Lambda functions are generally passed as callbacks, e.g. "myFunc(a, b, lambda c, d: c + d)". Note that the comma between c and d is somehow on a completely different level than the comma between a and b, even though they're both within the same brackets, because instead of using something like, say, universally agreed-upon grouping symbols to visually group the lambda function arguments together, Python groups them using a reserved keyword on one end, and two little dots on the other end. Like yeah, that's easy to notice among 10 other variable and argument names. But Python couldn't really do any better, because "myFunc(a, b, (c, d): c + d)" would be even less readable and prone to typos given how fucked up Python's use of brackets already is.

And while I'm on the topic of dumb Python syntax, let's look at the switch, um, match statements. For a long time, people behind Python argued that a bunch of elif statements with the same fucking conditions (e.g. x == 1, x == 2, x == 3, ...) are more readable than a standard switch statement, but then in Python 3.10 (released only 1 year ago), they finally came to their senses and added match and case keywords to implement pattern matching. Except they managed to fuck up yet again; instead of a normal "default:" statement, the default statement is denoted by "case _:". Because somehow, everywhere else in the code _ behaves as a normal variable name, but in match statement it instead means "ignore the value in this place". For example, "match myVar:" and "case [first, *rest]:" will behave exactly like "[first, *rest] = myVar" as long as myVar is a list with one or more elements, but "case [_, *rest]:" won't assign the first element from the list to anything, even though "[_, *rest] = myVar" will assign it to _. Because fuck consistency, that's why.

And why the fuck is there no fallthrough? Wouldn't it make perfect sense to write

case ('rgb', r, g, b):
case ('argb', _, r, g, b):
case ('rgba', r, g, b, _):
case ('bgr', b, g, r):
case ('abgr', _, b, g, r):
case ('bgra', b, g, r, _):

and then, you know, handle r, g, and b values in the same fucking block of code? Pretty sure that would be more readable than having to write "handeRGB(r, g, b)" 6 fucking times depending on the input format. Oh, and never mind that Python already has a "break" keyword.

Speaking of the "break" keyword, if you try to use it outside of a loop, you get an error "'break' outside loop". However, there's also the "continue" keyword, and if you try to use it outside of a loop, you get an error "'continue' not properly in loop". Why the fuck are there two completely different error messages for that? Does it mean there exists some weird improper syntax to use "continue" inside of a loop? Or is it just another inconsistent Python bullshit where until Python 3.8 you couldn't use "continue" inside the "finally:" block (but you could always use "break", even though it does essentially the same thing, just branching to a different point).

Why do people mix JS vanilla with framework syntax? That's horrible.

Why do people use jQuery anyways? There's no need at all anymore. It is just dumb JS for dumb devs.

Did that trigger you? - well....

Wasted a bloody hour today wondering why a route was giving weird errors...

Turns out I inadvertently wrote a for ... in ... loop instead of a for ... of ...

It's my bloody fault for being retarded, but I swear this unholy mix of JavaScript and python I'm dealing with is doing bad things to my brain. 😔

Lua is one of the stupidest languages to ever exist.

Oh, the language is easy to learn? The syntax is friendly? There's only like negative 10 functions you ever need to know? Everything is a table?

EVERYTHING IS A TABLE?! WTF CARES? WHAT ABOUT NIL?!

The arrogance this language has is extraordinary, literally. No lang, except Lua, imposes such an opinionated dichotomy. Everything is a fucking table, or, it's nil. -- That's so fucking stupid.

And look, I get it, this lang (oh sorry, scripting language (?)) CAN be good and fun and whatever... the moment you start to do IO is the literal end of days.

Everything is nil. Except, if it's defined... then it's not nil. -- OK. That sounds sensible/reasonable enough. -- What if it's not defined? You get nil. What if it's not the right data? You get nil. Do I get errors/exceptions or whatever? No, absolutely not, you get nil... unless the application you're using with Lua with has a lib that handles that.

There are so many more issues I have with this lang, but honestly... Am I fucking missing something? Is this lang like actually super dooper awesome and I'm missing something? -- I can't not look at this language as just dumb and arrogant. -- It's literally a language where you have to manage and remember ALL conceivable state at ALL times.

WHY ISNT MY FILE HIGHLIGHT SYNTAX WORKING?!!!

*realizes I forgot to add the opening tags*

Oh wait I'm dumb

No Rant:

I guess I will start a religous discussion with it but I want your opinion on what tool I should learn.
Vim or Emacs (or stay with my IDE)?

For all of my programmer life I used IDEs... From Eclipse over CodeBlocks over VS to IntelliJ.
But now I realized that I want to be one of the cool kids. And using plain IntelliJ is uncool. No matter how much I love this tool.

So now I want to invest some time into learning. I never managed to do much in Vim since all code-completions sucked ass, feedback on syntax errors was bad and I never saw how I could be any faster with that shit compared to what IntelliJ does for me.
Will Emacs solve all those problems? Will Emacs make me code 1000 times faster and make having a mouse useless?
Or am I just too dumb for Vim? Can Vim itself do what my IDE does for me? Will it make me look as cool as I want to be?
Or should I stick to IntelliJ and just install Vim bindings?

What is your opinion on Vim vs Emacs vs any IDE?

Who else is fed up of memes on Facebook like 'She was upset because I didn't talk to her. She didn't know that it was because I missed a semicolon in my code'

Really?? WTF compiler do you use dude? Because of such shitty memes, couple of my non-dev friends asked me how frequently I miss the semicolon in my code?! I said never because:
1. I am not a dumb coder to compile my programs with any syntax errors.
2. Even if I do, I fix it in a minute.

:| WTF really! These dumbheads don't make memes on bugs.

So. I'm a hobby pythonist. I like it a lot, so when a problem occured at my workplace I offered to my boss that I could write something. I don't know what happened, but at the end we agreed that the best way would be to use excel and write the engine in VBA. So, I spend two and a half days to learn the basics and start to write some code to show him a demo version of my idea. At the end of the last day I gave it up. IT HURTS!!!!!! After python it'so dumb and the syntax is so painful... Finally in the last half day I wrote the whole piece of @&*^ in python. I hope it'll be good enough. I don't want to use VBA again. I'm a cnc operator/programmer and I don't have enough time to learn it. It's bad?

Looking into Kotlin, and it seems pretty cool, but I just can't get over how unnatural and annoying the mapOf syntax is.

In JavaScript: const obj = { a: 1, b: { c: 3, d: 4 } }

In Kotlin: val obj = mapOf("a" to 1, "b" to mapOf("c" to 3, "d" to 4))

If somebody needs a project idea how about a really dumb JS Framework that allows you do basic DOM Manipulation, just like jQuery, directly in the elements class attribute.

For example this is how a document could look like:
<body class="init-hide-id-otherElement">
<button class="onclick-show-id-otherElement">
<h1 id="otherElement">Hello</h2>
</body>

What this does is first, at the body's init-* class, it hides the element with id otherElement at page load. Then, when you click the button, the element with id otherElement gets shown. Instead of *-id-* you could also use *-class-* which selects a class.
Basically the syntax is:
<event>-<action>-<id/class>-<the elements id/class>

Of course this has a lot of limitations, for example the selectors are very limited, but it would still be very cool!

I just finished a bunch of newly configured containers that I had to switch off centos7 to almalinux9. I have one thing to say,

Fuck NetworkManager!

I know im basically a dinosaur when it comes to any coding, especially scripting. I prefer notepad.exe or sublime to VScode... you couldnt pay me enough to use crap like vbstudio... but I know I need to get better at not just rewriting thing to suit my preferences since i have others working for or with me now.

so... I tried... I reeeeally tried to tolerate NetworkManager... tried to learn/tolerate dumb nmcli and it's matrixed array of dyslexic syntaxes. I just couldnt do it... that plus the damn default images having bs like an effectively blank, non-error-generating resolv.conf file.

NetworkManager got killed... I went back and edited my network-scripts and scripted those to other scripts for changing the statics around if/when needed... took waaaay less time.

I just dont get why something like NetworkManager even exists on any EL distro... yeah sure, wifi takes a couple extra steps and is super common now... but shouldnt be how any actual servers need to communicate. can people just not fathom putting shit in a few files in proper syntax anymore???

don't know whether i am too dumb to understand apl syntax or the documentation is just shitty. where should the damn data payload go?

I learned something.
L
E
A
R
N
E
D
Why do i see so many learnt with a t? Are all past tense verbs changing or just the one that is supposed to indicate learnedness, knowledge, intelligence, achivement?
Am i taking this too seriously? BECAUSE I ALMOST ALWAYS SEE CODERS DOING THIS LEARNT CRAP. STOP. YOU LOOK DUMB.

Or is it just me? Too uptight? Bc to me, learnt is a syntax error. And is not even a fucking t sound it's a d. Big fat d.