do all programmers are lazy or is it only me?😒

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

Just read an article that really grinds my gears. Its about coding in other languages. Not programming languages, but literally other languages.

Btw I learned to code in Spanish and I'm not against coding in programming languages using variable names in other languages.

That's fine.

What pissed me off was that the author claimed that we should be able to code Fucking JavaScript in SWAHILI or other languages available. What kind of PC bullshit is that!

Coding is barely fucking readable and now we have to make standards for Multilanguage support. Just learn the less than 60 reserved words you lazy fuck and code with them! I leaned to code with shitty tutorials in Spanish and theres no 1000x resources out there and this author claims you can't code unless you know english.

Granted. It's easier but wtf not just learn it. When I coded in Java in Spanish, I didn't know wtf a Class was or ags meant. So what. I memorized that shit. How? By coding!

Why bring this PC shit to programming? The author thinks there are few programmers bc we don't support fucking SWAHILI in JavaScript. Fuck no!

Now if you want to support this initiative. Think of this,

...legacy code

...in 32+ languages.

Have fun debugging this thing.

trs()

For those of you desiring to post non-rants, I wrote a handy utility function for you:

/*
* Toggles whether this post is
* a rant or not.
*/
function toggleRant()
{
// Check if toggling is safe
for(var i = 0; i < 999999999; i ++)
for(var t = 0; t < 999999999; t ++);
console.log("Crazy security checks came through.")

// Toggle ('isRant' is true by default)
isRant = !isRant
}

From now on, you can easily put 'toggleRant()' on the first line of any rant. As we all know, the 'isRant' on devRant is true by default.

Feel free to play around with it:

toggleRant()
toggleRant()
toggleRant()

This would also indicate that your "rant" is not a rant.

I've also wrapped the 'toggleRant' into another function with a shorter name for you lazy people (which most programmers are):

/*
* Wrapper for 'toggleRant'.
*/
function tr()
{
toggleRant()
trogus() // Just in case
}

Or if you type one additional letter, you also make sure that it's extra safe to call the function:

/*
* Extra safe version of 'tr'.
*/
function trs()
{
for(var i = 0; i < 746985768; i ++);
console.log ("Extra safe")

tr()
}

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

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.

JQuery is not badly designed... It's not designed at all.

JQuery is just awful and it's being used by people who know nothing about programming... Hell, some of the JQuery developers were not even programmers or had programmed before.

JQuery is a part of the whole "Wordpress community/world" and that world is full of people who doesn't understand what they are doing, Wordpress isn't designed either (that's why Wordpress stores serialized data in a structured database).

Every single Wordpress theme developer includes JQuery and it's disgusting. Most of the time, they don't even use it.

JQuery is not Javascript on steroids, it's javascript with cancer. Get rid of it. It's bloated and only lazy people use it. (JQuery will give you about 200ms extra response time for your site)

Why are programmers considered so so so LAZY

Are programmers so
1. Busy to skip to get the time for shave, (long hair and beard),
2. Or lazy to skip.
3. Or don't find it as a need.

Sorry for poor English