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Pointers in and of themselves are simple, true. I bet people generally don't have much trouble with them fundamentally and conceptually.
But you can do some truly wackadoodle shit with them, and that's where the problems begin.
For example:
int var = 789;
int *ptr = &var;
int **ptr_to_ptr = &ptr;
printf("Value of var = %d\n", **ptr_to_ptr);
...or...
int x = 10;
int *p = &x;
int **pp = &p;
int ***ppp = &pp;
printf("%d\n", ***ppp);
...or...
unsigned long val = 0x1122334455667788;
unsigned char *ptr = (unsigned char *)&val;
*(unsigned int *)ptr = 0xAAAABBBB;
printf("val = 0x%lx\n", val);
I agree those are kind of convoluted examples, but the point(er) is that you definitely can write C code using pointers that is a real bitch to follow, and stuff ALONG THESE LINES isn't really super-unusual in large codebases because somewhere, someone at some time thinks "oh, this is clever!" and drops a nightmare in someone else's lap years later. -
Because the Google UI engineers are contract-bound to implement SOME change every six months, no matter what it is, or they lose their jobs.
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I'd have answered "oh, so you're just asking about what I did last month?" ... and, yes, it would clearly be an exaggeration... but you know, there have been months I can think of where I'm not at all sure it wouldn't be true.
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Yep, it's shit.
But it does depend a great deal on exactly how shitty your organization makes it.
I use GitLab at home for my personal projects and even though one or two of them are orders of magnitude more complex than what I do on the job, the CI/CD setup for it is actually pretty terse, simple, and straightforward. I have no real complaints about it.
Contrast that with the utter garbage we have at work, where there are templates on top of templates that inherit this and integrate that and I'm looking at literally thousands of lines of YAML just to build what is, ultimately, a pretty bog standard Java webapp, and get it deployed.
I can do what it does by hand with maybe half a dozen commands at most.
In other words: they've taken what can be a fairly nice and elegant thing and turned it into a corporate nightmare of staggering proportions that I HATE dealing with every time I have to.
So, to a large degree, it's about how much enshittification has set in. -
@retoor Agreed. Like most things, it's not the perfect answer for every situation. But I DO think it could have been the right answer for a whole lot more situations had Sencha not screwed the pooch.
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@retoor I'm not sure if you're being facetious or not, but I'll go on record and say that's my actual, unironic take.
I've built several massive projects with ExtJS over the last 15 years and it's interesting to me how none of them had any of the problems people always seem to enumerate about other frameworks/libraries/toolkits. It just gets the job done.
No, it's not the sexiest thing, not by a longshot. And shit developers can make an absolute mess with it, but that's true of almost anything. And it certainly has its own problems because what doesn't?
But I've been a fan for a long time based on a ton of experience with it.
It's just a shame that Sencha shoots themselves in the foot at every turn, starting with the exorbitant cost (paying for quality is one thing, having to fence blood diamonds to be able to afford it is another). They probably could have been the top of the heap for years if they had not been worried about maximizing profit over building mindshare. -
@TheBeardedOne Agreed. I think it's better for experienced developers who can spot the mistakes. I've definitely encountered some. But the benefits seem to outweigh the costs, as long as you don't treat the answers as gospel and have the existing knowledge to do so.
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The beauty of ChatGPT and its ilk is that you can ask as many "stupid" follow-up questions as you need to without fear, because everyone has holes in their knowledge.
You may be asking the most complex question imaginable because you're a rock star, but the solution it gives you might contain some language feature you've just never encountered, maybe some function call you've never seen before, and it's nice to be able to ask "hey, what the hell is that?" without risking being attacked for not knowing something "obvious".
Being able to go off on tangents without worrying about toxic people hammering you over the head for not knowing every last little detail about everything is fantastic for everyone of all skill levels and makes these things worth using regardless of any negatives they may have. -
The only codebase where the option for linting for profanity has to be turned off.
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@ScriptCoded It's the only thing we all have in common, really :)
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Well, they didn't play the game right: you just make every ticket 100 story points... even if they're REALLY only 4... and then you do 3 per sprint. Bang, you're a "10x-er" and effectively unfireable!
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Angular: for when the Brazen Bull doesn't seem QUITE diabolical enough and you wanna make sure someone REALLY suffers.
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@electrineer Right, and I didn't say anyone was claiming it was illegal. This is clearly a "good citizen or not" situation, so to speak. But I'm not seeing why they're a bad citizen in this case. Isn't the whole point of open-source, one of them anyway, to "build on the shoulders of giants", in a sense? I think it is. But does that automatically mean you HAVE to contribute back? As I said earlier, unless we're going to give EVERY project out there that builds on the work of others a hard time for not open-sourcing their own work then I don't see why we'd make a stink about it this time.
However, I concede the security point is a good one. I think it's a separate issue, but a very valid one. -
@Fast-Nop Yep, I get that, I just don't see it the same way. Again, as I said earlier: we don't scream and yell about every person that doesn't open-source something they built on top of other open-source, right? So then why is Vivaldi being assholes for doing that when no one else is?
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@chaosesqueteam You really feel the need to start with "hey moron", and think it doesn't make YOU look like the moron right off the bat, huh? Man, some people.
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So, did anyone actually read the blog post?
The part they aren't open-sourcing is the part they themselves wrote. No one is ever under any obligation to open-source something that isn't derived from an OSS source, which their UI layer isn't. And it's not hypocritical to not do so just because it's built on top of something that IS open-source in the same way that we don't bitch and moan about literally every company on Earth not open-sourcing what they built just because it runs on, say, Tomcat, which is itself open-source.
If they aren't pushing any changes they might make to Chromium back then yeah, that's a reason to complain because it's literally a license violation. But that's not the case.
And if their justification for not open-sourcing what they built is they don't want others to fork their work then that's no better or worse than literally any other reason anyone could give because... say it with me... NO ONE IS EVER OBLIGATED TO OPEN-SOURCE THEIR ORIGINAL WORK. -
@Demolishun Oh sure, they existed since, what, Dartmouth BASIC I think, in the 60's maybe? But usage of them before maybe the early 90's was, generally speaking, the exception, not the rule... and FOR SURE they were nowhere near the level of aid and automation they are now, which is really the point that matters. Before maybe the mid-90's or so, roughly, they were little more than glorified text editors with a little bit of added knowledge of said text, and project organizers.
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@netikras You'll get no argument from me. I remember when IDEs started to become a thing, I definitely had that "get outta here with that shit" mentality... but that was, I don't know, 20 years ago or so maybe? I was obviously wrong then, and my tune has changed completely. I'm definitely not one of those "just use a text editor" people... I know -I- don't just want to use a text editor... but by the same token, my point is that some people literally can barely do their jobs without an IDE and all the tooling we have today. We have all these tools for a reason - and they for sure are valuable and definitely should be used - but if you are DEPENDENT on them, that's where I have a problem, and I've seen that A LOT, unfortunately..
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Seemingly most devs today: "Hey, I can't work today, my IDE is messed up, not doing what it's supposed to, and my workspace is corrupt!"
Older lead devs: "Well, how about you just drop to a command prompt, re-clone the repo, and work in Notepad or some other basic text editor for the day?"
Seemingly most devs today: "What?! You can't do that! How would you know what to type without intellisense and Copilot and all the things an IDE does for me?! That's impossible! You can't even do a simple refactor without an IDE!"
Older lead devs: "Oh my sweet summer child..." -
Same thing we do every weekend, Pinky...
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@lorentz I wouldn't be looking for anything too in-depth. As long as you can tell me it's a tree, that's probably all I need to hear in terms of strructure. That said, I expect any web developer to know basic things like getElementById()... I have literally asked candidates "let's say you have a div that you want to insert content into, and you know it's ID, how do you get a reference to it in JS using that ID?" and I get blank stares. I mean, there's GOTTA be a baseline of knowledge, and that for me is it (I'll even let it slide if they give me a jQuery-centric answer or something like that, which has happened a few times). Not sure if that answers your question?
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@Oktokolo I know... but you'd be surprised how many devs I've seen get totally flummoxed by that situation.
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@Grumpycat Exactly.
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@Oktokolo The reason being distributed is bad... and I see it over and over again with average developers... is that the mental model is more complicated than it needs to be. Git is fine when nothing goes wrong. But when it doesn't:
"Why aren't my changes in the repo, I committed them!"
"Oh, the commit worked, but the push failed because I didn't include a valid Jira ticket in the commit message and the hook rejected it, what do I do now because my IDE is showing me nothing to do?"
"Rest HEAD? What does that mean? Why do I have to? Oh, just do it because it works for some reason and don't worry about understanding? Okay then."
Things like this happen ALL THE TIME, and we're not talking about the world's worst developers here.
It's ironic that Git is the ONE tool developers are happy to be FORCED to understand to use effectively while most others they're happy to just ignorantly let the magic happen (cra, ng, Spring, Maven, etc.) -
@Oktokolo And I've used many VCS's before Git too (SVN, SourceSafe, CVS, Perforce, ClearCase, CMVC) and Git is near the bottom of the pile as far as I'm concerned (above SourceSafe only, honestly).
It's a horribly overengineered mess that only won because of a cult of personality around its creator and the industry being sucked in by, basically, marketing (how many teams ACTUALLY need a DISTRIBUTED VCS? I'll give you the answer: not many).
Git is over-complicated beyond the most basic of operations and is confusing to developers even if they won't admit it.
"there almost always is a way to come back from a user error when using git"
...yes, and there has to be because errors happen A LOT with Git.
It also, for some weird reason, makes people think they need to use some NASA-ish branching strategy to "do Git right", which is likely an offshoot from its overengineered nature.
It's a clever implementation, sure, but that's about the only good thing I'll say about it. -
SQL > ORM
SQL ain't bad at all, you just have to take the time to learn it properly. After that, sure, you'll occasionally run into variations specific to various RDBMS's that might make you screech a bit, but the basics don't change and those aren't terribly hard to grasp.
It's MUCH better than the "gee, I hope this overly-complex piece of garbage ORM doesn't totally shit the bed coming up with the model and costing me massive time and money to detangle the mess enough for the app to work decently" paradigm. Sure, you could have probably MADE it do what you needed from the start by using this ORM's specific concepts, but then good luck moving to a new one.
No, gimme SQL every day of the week and twice on Sunday over any ORM on the planet.
And, ironically, looking like COBOL is a feature, not a bug. When did it become necessary for code to look like motherfucking CODE that we have to hire Windtalkers to understand?! Fuck all this modern symbology bullshit! -
You don't think SOME baseline DS&A knowledge has relevance to virtually any development job? I mean, I'm not gonna ask you a bunch of in-depth shit for a web dev job because you're right, it's not especially relevant... but for example, can you tell me the difference between a Set and a Map? Can you tell me what data structure the DOM is and explain why it's that and not something else? Because those are pretty basic DS&A questions in my book, and I WOULD absolutely expect any developer to be able to answer them (well, the second one only if it's a front-end web dev position, obviously). If you literally accept NO DS&A questions in an interview, then you're artificially limiting your opportunities. But if what you really mean is "don't ask me all sorts of wacky shit that we both know I'll NEVER use, even conceptually, on the job" then yeah, okay, I'm on the same page. I don't care if you can invert a binary tree, but you gotta know SOMETHING, right?
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Writes a fantastic comment... but then goes and cancels it out by using eight spaces for indentation while not putting a space between if and the opening parenthesis or between the closing parenthesis and opening brace?!
What a monster! Get him! -
@Root Totally cool, you're the one there so I gotta accede to your judgement. Just wanted to offer a potential alternate perspective in case you hadn't considered it. Sounds like you have, so carry on - with my sympathies :)
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You could be 100% right that they're just idiots.
But, consider the possibility that they actually know what they're talking about better than your co-workers do. After all, IN THEORY, they wouldn't have gotten promoted if they didn't prove themselves over a period of time.
Yes, some people get promoted despite their incompetence and because they know how to play the game well... and some get promoted because they're much better at a management role than a technical role so that's where they go and perform better.
But that's not every manager out there. Some actually are very good technically and it's just a natural progression to move into management at some point.
Hey, I'm not there, so I don't know. You could just have all idiot managers, absolutely possible. But don't ASSUME that's the case and don't assume everyone BUT them know what they're talking about.