terrible programmers: my god, it's full of chars

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > terrible programmers: my god, it's full of chars

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kitten emergency: Jan 13, 2008; get meow this wack-ass crystal prison

pgroce posted:

this sounds more like the challenges of not having documentation than the challenges of writing documentation.

ok, the writing challenge is that the people who know how it works dont want to write it

# ? Apr 9, 2016 20:55

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# ? May 20, 2024 20:15

pgroce: Oct 24, 2002

uncurable mlady posted:

ok, the writing challenge is that the people who know how it works dont want to write it

to be fair, lack of documentation isn't a risk in itself; it's a mitigation for the risk of being unable to maintain or use the software. if you have other mitigations (like low turnover and lots of people familiar with the code and willingness to teach newbs) maybe writing and maintaining documentation isn't worth the effort.

but in that case, you (or management) need to see those mitigations for what they are and put the effort into them. personally, i think it's perfectly okay to invest in retaining, cross-training and mentoring people on a large, long-term project; lower need for docs is just one of the benefits you get from that.

but then some chucklefuck comes along and thinks you're spending too much money on salary and not enough time closing tickets and everything goes to hell. a lot of the time docs are an organization's insurance against its own shortsighted management.

# ? Apr 9, 2016 22:48

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

is xamarin still terrible, I want to make an iOS toy app but my old Mac can barely run Xcode. I could buy a Mac mini (700 earth dollars) or I could hook it up to visual studio (msdn baby).

# ? Apr 10, 2016 00:14

akadajet: Sep 14, 2003

Luigi Thirty posted:

is xamarin still terrible, I want to make an iOS toy app but my old Mac can barely run Xcode. I could buy a Mac mini (700 earth dollars) or I could hook it up to visual studio (msdn baby).

If you have a desktop pc just install osx on it.
http://www.tonymacx86.com/el-capitan-desktop-guides/172672-unibeast-install-os-x-el-capitan-any-supported-intel-based-pc.html

# ? Apr 10, 2016 03:23

akadajet: Sep 14, 2003

double post!

# ? Apr 10, 2016 03:24

simble: May 11, 2004

I haven't looked at osx86 poo poo in a long time, but is there still some pretty specific hardware requirements like down to motherboard manufacturer?

# ? Apr 10, 2016 04:04

akadajet: Sep 14, 2003

simble posted:

I haven't looked at osx86 poo poo in a long time, but is there still some pretty specific hardware requirements like down to motherboard manufacturer?

It helps if you're buying with compatibility in mind, but I think most of the common gigabyte/asus/msi stuff works.

# ? Apr 10, 2016 04:12

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

today i learned that vb6's garbage collector sucks rear end at reference counting:

Visual Basic .NET code:

function poop(goatman as butt) as Boolean

with goatman
      if .isGaping then
           poop = True
           Exit Function 'problem is here
      End If
      do some other stuff with the goatman object
exit function

in vb6, exiting a function inside the with block leaks a reference to the object and it can never be released during the life of the program. the recommend style here is to just do goatman.isGaping or whatever. with blocks are nominally faster, but on modern hardware the difference is small.

in the sorts of toy apps you typically see in vb6 you'd never notice this anyway, but when you have a client developed by 5000+ programmers enough of these leaked references pile up to fill a workstation's memory. good times.

# ? Apr 10, 2016 06:40

~Coxy: Dec 9, 2003; R.I.P. Inter-OS Sass - b.2000AD d.2003AD

Luigi Thirty posted:

is xamarin still terrible, I want to make an iOS toy app but my old Mac can barely run Xcode. I could buy a Mac mini (700 earth dollars) or I could hook it up to visual studio (msdn baby).

I haven't used xamarin but my impression was that you needed a Mac anyway

# ? Apr 10, 2016 09:09

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

~Coxy posted:

I haven't used xamarin but my impression was that you needed a Mac anyway

every way you can develop for iOS will require a Mac to run the iOS Simulator, to sign code for iOS for development, to communicate with iOS devices for development, and to sign code for iOS for submission or deployment

# ? Apr 10, 2016 09:41

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Luigi Thirty posted:

is xamarin still terrible, I want to make an iOS toy app but my old Mac can barely run Xcode. I could buy a Mac mini (700 earth dollars) or I could hook it up to visual studio (msdn baby).

if you haven't already put one in, an SSD can make a huge difference, and they're p cheap now for reasonable sizes

also goes without saying but max out your RAM

and as long as your Mac can run El Capitan, you can run the latest Xcode

# ? Apr 10, 2016 09:44

hackbunny: Jul 22, 2007; I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

today i learned that vb6's garbage collector sucks rear end at reference counting:

oh gently caress this is terrible

# ? Apr 10, 2016 10:18

BattleMaster: Aug 14, 2000

hackbunny posted:

oh gently caress this is terrible

sums up visual basic pretty nicely and i am still mystified as to how it ever achieved any level of professional use

# ? Apr 10, 2016 13:47

Bloody: Mar 3, 2013

javascript

# ? Apr 10, 2016 13:49

BattleMaster: Aug 14, 2000

Bloody posted:

javascript

javascript in the browser isn't the worst thing in the world if only because when client-side scripting became a thing there weren't that many viable scripting language choices

poo poo like node.js is just smdh, don't start using this garbage-rear end grandfathered language in other contexts thanks

edit: that is to say i'll give any language a pass if it has an excuse, visual basic never had an excuse, vbscript never had an excuse, node.js never had an excuse, ruby on rails never had an excuse, etc.

BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Apr 10, 2016

# ? Apr 10, 2016 13:53

~Coxy: Dec 9, 2003; R.I.P. Inter-OS Sass - b.2000AD d.2003AD

BattleMaster posted:

sums up visual basic pretty nicely and i am still mystified as to how it ever achieved any level of professional use

it's the early 90s and you can quickly create a basic GUI program without having to do much more than drag and drop

the real shame is that HyperCard beat it thoroughly but died ignominiously

# ? Apr 10, 2016 13:58

BattleMaster: Aug 14, 2000

~Coxy posted:

it's the early 90s and you can quickly create a basic GUI program without having to do much more than drag and drop

the real shame is that HyperCard beat it thoroughly but died ignominiously

i never thought about that, which makes sense somewhat because dealing with raw winapi isn't the most fun you can have. though it found use in applications like UnrealEd that should have had actual effort put into them

# ? Apr 10, 2016 14:02

mystes: May 31, 2006

BattleMaster posted:

sums up visual basic pretty nicely and i am still mystified as to how it ever achieved any level of professional use

Because while the language is complete garbage, other methods for making GUI windows applications at the time were pretty awful in their own right?

Edit: Beaten.

Also, in the late 90s/early 2000s, the attitude of people online was like, "Visual Basic is bad because it makes programming too easy :smuggo:

" which is completely insane in multiple ways.

mystes fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Apr 10, 2016

# ? Apr 10, 2016 14:07

Bloody: Mar 3, 2013

lol I remember unironically espousing that attitude

I was a terrible person as a teenager

# ? Apr 10, 2016 14:58

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

eschaton posted:

if you haven't already put one in, an SSD can make a huge difference, and they're p cheap now for reasonable sizes

also goes without saying but max out your RAM

and as long as your Mac can run El Capitan, you can run the latest Xcode

it's a 2011 MacBook Air.

# ? Apr 10, 2016 15:16

BattleMaster: Aug 14, 2000

mystes posted:

Also, in the late 90s/early 2000s, the attitude of people online was like, "Visual Basic is bad because it makes programming too easy " which is completely insane in multiple ways.

lol ugh i'm glad that "programming needs to be hard" is an attitude that has largely died off

# ? Apr 10, 2016 15:55

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

BattleMaster posted:

lol ugh i'm glad that "programming needs to be hard" is an attitude that has largely died off

i bought the opengl red book when i was in college because i thought that if you didn't write your own 3d engine from scratch you couldn't really call yourself a game developer, you were just a moron who let other people do all the hard work for you

thank god i only paid $5 for it

# ? Apr 10, 2016 16:06

Jerry Bindle: May 16, 2003

i did the same thing with OpenGL. i never _did_ figure out how to actually draw a loving box in OpenGl, all the references skipped over the part where you create a window to put the scene into bc it was ofc platform specific

# ? Apr 10, 2016 16:09

BattleMaster: Aug 14, 2000

Barnyard Protein posted:

i did the same thing with OpenGL. i never _did_ figure out how to actually draw a loving box in OpenGl, all the references skipped over the part where you create a window to put the scene into bc it was ofc platform specific

OpenGL is a lot of fun if you use something else to create the window and context for you; SDL can do it with only a couple of function calls

also some 3D engines I've used won't throw a fit if you just make your own opengl function calls in the middle of the draw loop

I'm definitely not pro enough to make my own full-featured engine though, lol

# ? Apr 10, 2016 16:13

The MUMPSorceress: Jan 6, 2012; ^SHTPSTS; Gary’s Answer

~Coxy posted:

it's the early 90s and you can quickly create a basic GUI program without having to do much more than drag and drop

the real shame is that HyperCard beat it thoroughly but died ignominiously

it's this, plus you can easily compile your controls as com and activex objects, which was a big win in like 1997

# ? Apr 10, 2016 16:31

Soricidus: Oct 21, 2010; freedom-hating statist shill

BattleMaster posted:

lol ugh i'm glad that "programming needs to be hard" is an attitude that has largely died off

it's more that we've realised that it's still really hard even if you can just drag and drop forms together, things like vb don't actually threaten anyone

also it helps that webdev has managed, by a careful combination of standardising bad ideas and then taking years to even agree to maybe think about fixing some of them, to make ui hard again, so you can't even just drag and drop forms any more

# ? Apr 10, 2016 16:45

Luigi Thirty: Apr 30, 2006; Emergency confection port.

Barnyard Protein posted:

i did the same thing with OpenGL. i never _did_ figure out how to actually draw a loving box in OpenGl, all the references skipped over the part where you create a window to put the scene into bc it was ofc platform specific

i figured out how to draw a polygon from a list of points and that was about it. i think i used a python opengl wrapper that handled all that for me.

# ? Apr 10, 2016 16:48

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

i managed to draw a bunch of textured rectangles in opengl es on android after spending about 3 days on it.

ama

# ? Apr 10, 2016 17:02

HoboMan: Nov 4, 2010

I had a programming class where one guy made an empty room in OpenGL and everyone, including the professor, was thoroughly impressed.

# ? Apr 10, 2016 17:39

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

BattleMaster posted:

lol ugh i'm glad that "programming needs to be hard" is an attitude that has largely died off

not in academia

# ? Apr 10, 2016 17:48

BattleMaster: Aug 14, 2000

computer parts posted:

not in academia

lol in my radiation shielding course i had to use fortran for a couple of labs and assignments. as in, you have to write a program to do these calculations and you have to use fortran. fortran isn't hard but it doesn't really have many concessions for usability and the idea of having to make anything big with it makes my skin crawl

# ? Apr 10, 2016 17:52