So I've had my "emergency meeting" with my manager about me leaving.

(Re https://devrant.com/rants/4896068 )

As some of you advised I prepared to try my best to stay exceptionally calm for this.

First my line manager just casually asked if I could stay. I politely explained "no. :)"

Then she said it's a catastrophe, they would be in a chaos, etc etc and then she personally assures I would have less bs meetings mid-sprints (one of the things I had requested a while back).
I responded that's kind but I also was far from what I should be earning.

Then she explained that suddenly now that I am leaving it would not be a problem to raise my salary as appropriate.
So I asked why could they not do this when I had brought this up a ton of times earlier and why I got peanuts as a raise in summer.

The response was that "they unfortunately could not get a higher budget authorised from higher up" and that " sadly that affected the whole team".

So I asked since when can they get this authorised and the response was "recently". Then she quickly switched back to the question whether I'd stay with higher salary and other earlier requests met.

I was pretty salty at this point so I just sarcastically said "unfortunately I've already signed".

She then switched back to "ok, ok, but we really need your help! you know it, the x project will be a nightmare to keep in one piece without me".

I literally just didn't respond so then she continued "ok so then can you then help us out for just a few hours a month for x/hour? please"

Now the thing is that this last offer actually would have been super compelling but given everything else I would not want to rejoin this environment. Thankfully I had to say anyways that my new contract doesn't allow that.

So then belive it or not, she asked me if I could ask my new employer to change the contract to permit me to still work a few hours a month for them.
What. the. fuck.

After this I was super done so just kept responsing a few words to everything and shortly after that we called the meeting. I feel dumb to have stayed here so long and am glad that my new contract doesn't allow working for others as maybe my stupid ass would have considered the offer on the spot.

EEEEEEEEEEEE Some fAcking languages!! Actually barfs while using this trashdump!

The gist: new job, position required adv C# knowledge (like f yea, one of my fav languages), we are working with RPA (using software robots to automate stuff), and we are using some new robot still in beta phase, but robot has its own prog lang.

The problem:
- this language is kind of like ASM (i think so, I'm venting here, it's ASM OK), with syntax that burns your eyes
- no function return values, but I can live with that, at least they have some sort of functions
- emojies for identifiers (like php's $var, but they only aim for shitty features so you use a heart.. ♥var)
- only jump and jumpif for control flow
- no foopin variable scopes at all (if you run multiple scripts at the same time they even share variables *pukes*)
- weird alt characters everywhere. define strings with regular quotes? nah let's be [some mental illness] and use prime quotes (‴ U+2034), and like ⟦ ⟧ for array indexing, but only sometimes!
- super slow interpreter, ex a regular loop to count to 10 (using jumps because yea no actual loops) takes more than 20 seconds to execute, approx 700ms to run 1 code row.
- it supports c# snippets (defined with these stupid characters: ⊂ ⊃) and I guess that's the only c# I get to write with this job :^}
- on top of that, outdated documentation, because yea it's beta, but so crappin tedious with this trail n error to check how every feature works

The question: why in the living fartfaces yolk would you even make a new language when it's so easy nowadays to embed compilers!?! the robot is apparently made in c#, so it should be no funcking problem at all to add a damn lua compiler or something. having a tcp api would even be easier got dammit!!! And what in the world made our company think this robot was a plausible choice?! Did they do a full fubbing analysis of the different software robots out there and accidentally sorted by ease of use in reverse order?? 'cause that's the only explanation i can imagine

Frillin stupid shitpile of a language!!! AAAAAHHH

see the attached screenshot of production code we've developed at the company for reference.

Disclaimer: I do not stand responsible for any eventual headaches or gauged eyes caused by the named image.

(for those interested, the robot is G1ANT.Robot, https://beta.g1ant.com/)

!rant

For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:

As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/

And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/

Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.

Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?

Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.

Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)

Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.

Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.

Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.

What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.

how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)

I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.

Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:

(+ 0.1 0.2)

Watch in awe at what you get.

In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"

Just tried to read this the frequently asked questions about article 13.
I don't think you need to read it, since you learn nothing from it besides that these people don't even care anymore. Everything is written in a "wishful" mode, even their goals.
You can just go to the next trash can, take an item and compare it with that. Unfortunately, you will have to realize that the item you just picked up was more useful to society than everything you'll read in these "answers".
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single...

They basically dodge every single question vague to the point that someone as the amount of drugs these people take in order to think they are making realistic proposes.

"We aim to blah blah", "Our aim is blah blah", "We want to blah blah". Might as well sue me for copying their content in that paragraph.
If anybody ever tells you that you have unrealistic, stupid goals or dreams just remember: there's a whole continent lead by people who have no fucking idea what they are doing and still think they are doing a good job. And because they have no idea what they are doing they just offload all the work to companies.

Plattform: Ok, what do we have to do?
EU: lol, just "put in place, in collaboration with right holders, adequate and proportionate technical measures." (#2 P4)
Plattform: can you be a bit more specific?
EU: Look, this proposal just "requires platforms which store and provide access to large amounts of copyright-protected content uploaded by their users to put in place effective and proportionate measures." It's not that hard to understand, you dummy (#3 P3)
Plattform: So we need to monitor all user-generated content?
Eu: are you stupid or something? You "would not have to actively monitor all the content uploaded by users", just the copyrighted content. (#4 P1)

The rest is more or less the same, just them imagining the outcome, without taking turning on their decomposed brains in order to apply common sense.

Jumping off this "union" seems be pretty lucrative 🤔

In
https://devrant.com/rants/4221216/...

Hes discussing confidence and I wanted to talk about that for a moment, from a guy who struggled with it a lot growing up.

Half of confidence is headfaking yourself into distracting the lizard brain portion that didn't evolve for the last ten thousand years of rabid human social change and thus detects a bunch of social interactions as varying forms of threats.

Same way NLP works, or stupid shit like seduction, or sales techniques.

It's all about slowing down and distracting yourself with the process.

People that do all this dont realize the trick is you're thinking less because you've slowed down and this comes off as confidence.

Think about it. What do nervous people do? Either talk way less, and/or when they *do*, talk fast and lack certainty. What does confidence techniques and all that shit do? Causes you to slow down, follow process which makes answers clearer usually, and causes you to speak more freely (even if its more structured).

Thats the entire game.

Give yourself time to think and room to answer, to think of a question and formulate a response. Assume nothing while you do so.

One trick I use that boils *all* the other processes down is this: Anything you go to say, pause, look the person in the eye, and wait 1-2 seconds to respond. Remember to blink, and remember to gesture as you normally would.

Treat every conversation as a casual dialogue over coffee with a friend discussing colors of paint for a kitchen. Its a slow process isn't it?

Same thing with any other conversation. People will find you a lot more deliberate, confident, warm and unassuming.