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The 256th day of every year is celebrated as Programmers’ Day.
Interestingly, 256 is the highest power of two that is less than 365.
It falls on September 13 during common years and September 12 in leap years.
This day is an international professional day recognized in many companies and organizations.
It’s even officially recognized in Russia as the “Day of the Programmer.”
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After a long time just reading your posts, here's my first post:
Just for clarification: I'm studying electrical engineering in Germany. During your time at university, you have to work half a year as a intern to get some practical experience. So I'm in a position where I mainly have to say "yes" to work that is given to me. Also I'm working with a lot of PLC programmers, so I'm nearly the only one who programs non-PLC stuff at the department.
But now it's time for my rant (and also my most satisfying optimization ever). In the job interview for the internship, my task at the company was described as C# programmer. I only programmed C and Python before, but C# looked interesting and so I learned C# from ground up in the summer before the internship. I quite liked it and I was really happy on my first day of work. Then I was greeted with this message: "I know you are hired as C# programmer, but could you please look into this VBA program, it takes 55 seconds until it finishes its task and that's to slow". So I (midly angry because I had to do VBA and not C#) started the program and it was really horribly slow (it just created a table with certain contents from a very big imported symbol file). I then opened up the source code and immideately saw bad code. The guy who wrote it basically just clicked on the macro recording button and used the recorded mouse clicks in the source code. The code was like: Click on cell A1 -> copy cell A1 -> move to sheet XY -> click on cell A2 -> paste copied stuff and so on... I never 'programmed' in VBA before, so I used my knowledge of 'real' programming languages to do this task. After using some arrays and for-loops, which did not iterate over all the 1.000.000 unused cells after the last used one, the program took only 3 seconds after it finished the new table! Everybody was quite impressed, which led to much more VBA optimization... That was clearly not my goal haha :)9 -
Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?
- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.
Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.
But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!
After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:
- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.
Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.
Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.7 -
Rant...ish? It's more mixed feelings...
Had my first day yesterday at a new job in a big company. I came dressed really nicely in a suit and tie. Went to orientation with everyone new coming in.
Felt like I made the right choice to up my effort in dress code.
Met with my manager, was led to my team. Everyone is dressed casually. Unshaved. Giving me hate stares.
Felt out of place. But kind of happy that I can try less.
Still. What's up with programmers and being toxic to people dressed nicely o.0 I don't need to look like I came out of crunch time every single day to prove my worth...
It's really weird getting these looks. It's almost like highschool all over again. When I let my mother dress me and looked like the nerdiest kid on the block...
Then again, today I'm wearing sneakers and causal clothes. I either feel like I cave in to peer pressure... But at the same time I don't mind it. Erghhh... Still hate this...
Mixed feelings... I donno.4 -
Last year, 2nd year of Uni, we had to create an app that read from CSV file that contained info on the no of ppl in each class and things like grades and such and had to display graphs of all the info tht you could then export as a pdf.
This had to also be sone in a team. I, however, hate doing anything other than programming (no team leader, pm bullshit) so I tell them I want to be one of the programmers (basically split the roles, rather than each one doing a bit of everything like my professor wanted) and we did.
I program this bitch wverything works well, I am happy. Day of the presentation comes, one of the graphs is broken... FUCK. I then go past it and never discuss the error. We got a 70.
I swear to God it worked on my computer -.-
I also have to mention that our professor was the client and he had set an actual deadline until we can ask him questions. After the deadline I realized I didn't know what a variable in the csv file was for and when I went to ask him he said "You should've asked me this before. I can't tell you now". My team was not the only one that didn't know and he gave the exact answer to everybody else. Got the answer from another team. Turns out it was useless.
He was the worst client ever. Why tf would you put a deadline on when you can ask the client questions?! I should be able to fucking ask questions during production if you want the product as you want it >.<7 -
Happy to be here 1st day and I'm enjoying it ,best social network ever for programmers ...been looking for such for so long and starting to get addicted.
Here I've learnt here that I need to start learning new stuff real fast.
Here I feel not alone,cos here I feel at home.
I'm Sam from Nigeria ( any Nigerian here?)2 -
I almost everytime these days start counting from zero in real life and f**k up the calculations and recalculate and do the same mistake. I hate programming.
Happy programmers day -
At the end of the day...does the end consumer REALLY give a shit about what language you program in? As long as the app fucking does what it's supposed to right? I feel like this is a never ending rant for me because it seems like programmers will never understand that it doesn't matter as long as the end consumer / client is happy.2
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