Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Subjunctive posted:

Threads are terrible, if that helps.

This one is a perfect example.

# ? May 6, 2016 01:30

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# ? Jun 1, 2024 19:11

Nude: Nov 16, 2014; I have no idea what I'm doing.

fritz posted:

This one is a perfect example.

# ? May 6, 2016 03:00

Suspicious Dish: Sep 24, 2011; 2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro; Fun Shoe

I spent an hour today tracking down memory leaks in Python code.

Python code:

def transform_tree(root):
    things = []

    def recurse(node):
        things.append(transform(node.data))
        for child in node.children:
            recurse(child)

     return things

Turns out this leaks — recurse holds onto things through a closure, and meaning it's a reference cycle. The cyclic GC in Python does not run very often.

I don't like Python very much.

# ? May 6, 2016 03:41

Athas: Aug 6, 2007; fuck that joker

If you need parallelism in your glue scripting language, you are doing something wrong.

# ? May 6, 2016 07:15

Pavlov: Oct 21, 2012; I've long been fascinated with how the alt-right develops elaborate and obscure dog whistles to try to communicate their meaning without having to say it out loud
Stepan Andreyevich Bandera being the most prominent example of that

Problem is enough people use python as a primary development language, not just as a scripting language.

Pavlov fucked around with this message at 07:41 on May 6, 2016

# ? May 6, 2016 07:39

Xarn: Jun 26, 2015

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

The lack of block scoping and the lack of true multithreading are my biggest peeves with Python, and I'm honestly not certain which of the two is worse.

Definitely the weird scoping.

# ? May 6, 2016 08:08

Zopotantor: Feb 24, 2013; ...und ist er drin dann lassen wir ihn niemals wieder raus...

Munkeymon posted:

Cuntpunch said he started out of nowhere, which points to it not being that insipid habit.

Perhaps he read the reader letter in a recent CACM which advertised this as a good idea. it isn't when the compiler doesn't enforce it and the next merge scrambles your oh so carefully maintained comments

# ? May 6, 2016 08:14

Zemyla: Aug 6, 2008; I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!

Threads are terrible, and the only thing worse is not having them and having to fake them. Back when I was doing DOS programming, there were lots of C libraries where cooperative multithreading was faked with setjmp/longjmp. Every one of them had their own unique... well, "quirks" was the most charitable word for it.

# ? May 6, 2016 08:30

VikingofRock: Aug 24, 2008

Athas posted:

If you need parallelism in your glue scripting language, you are doing something wrong.

Tons of scientific libraries (in my case Astropy) more-or-less only exist in Python, or the alternatives are worse. Plus, sometimes you gotta use what your collaborators use.

# ? May 6, 2016 08:49

ulmont: Sep 15, 2010; IF I EVER MISS VOTING IN AN ELECTION (EVEN AMERICAN IDOL) ,OR HAVE UNPAID PARKING TICKETS, PLEASE TAKE AWAY MY FRANCHISE

Zemyla posted:

Threads are terrible, and the only thing worse is not having them and having to fake them. Back when I was doing DOS programming, there were lots of C libraries where cooperative multithreading was faked with setjmp/longjmp. Every one of them had their own unique... well, "quirks" was the most charitable word for it.

I had to write one of those libraries in college. As best I can recall we would have aspired to only have "quirks."

# ? May 6, 2016 13:48

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Athas posted:

If you need parallelism in your glue scripting language, you are doing something wrong.

That isn't even remotely true. There are plenty of simple scripting tasks where you want to run multiple things at once. I've even turned shell scripts into makefiles because it was the lowest-effort way of parallelizing parts of them.

# ? May 6, 2016 14:06

piratepilates: Mar 28, 2004; So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.

Javascript has taken an interesting approach to threading by first not having any at all (a good move), and then having them only in the VM to handle queued async callbacks, and then "webworkers" which is just message-passing only threading, and now they're introducing more threading primitives but trying to make it so you cannot possibly gently caress this up and have to deal with real threading problems.

# ? May 6, 2016 14:14

Athas: Aug 6, 2007; fuck that joker

VikingofRock posted:

Tons of scientific libraries (in my case Astropy) more-or-less only exist in Python, or the alternatives are worse. Plus, sometimes you gotta use what your collaborators use.

Plorkyeran posted:

That isn't even remotely true. There are plenty of simple scripting tasks where you want to run multiple things at once. I've even turned shell scripts into makefiles because it was the lowest-effort way of parallelizing parts of them.

I admit I was being a bit facetious, partly because Python is so very slow that I cannot see why one would want to parallelise it (writing performance-intensive parts in another language seems like a better approach).

That aside, isn't the GIL only an issue for running Python bytecode in parallel? As I have been led to understand, functions called through the FFI (that have not asked for the global lock), as well as subprocesses, can run in parallel just fine.

# ? May 6, 2016 14:25

Series DD Funding: Nov 25, 2014; by exmarx

Zemyla posted:

Threads are terrible, and the only thing worse is not having them and having to fake them. Back when I was doing DOS programming, there were lots of C libraries where cooperative multithreading was faked with setjmp/longjmp. Every one of them had their own unique... well, "quirks" was the most charitable word for it.

User threads are actually really good when done correctly (i.e. goroutines). There's definitely no way to make the internals pretty, though

# ? May 6, 2016 14:32

xzzy: Mar 5, 2009

Considering processors have tapered off on improving speed, parallelism is kind of mandatory if you want to process some poo poo quicker.

Too bad it's such a goddamn pain in the rear end.

# ? May 6, 2016 14:54

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

piratepilates posted:

Javascript has taken an interesting approach to threading by first not having any at all (a good move), and then having them only in the VM to handle queued async callbacks, and then "webworkers" which is just message-passing only threading, and now they're introducing more threading primitives but trying to make it so you cannot possibly gently caress this up and have to deal with real threading problems.

this is a reasonable approach in the case of a language with, uh, let's say "such a low barrier to entry".

# ? May 6, 2016 19:27

dougdrums: Feb 25, 2005; CLIENT REQUESTED ELECTRONIC FUNDING RECEIPT (FUNDS NOW)

I maybe don't understand them, but I don't like the approaches to concurrency in C#. I think there's like three different ways you can make the same thread pool with the same scheduler, and the built in scheduler can be a bit wonky sometimes. I think what happens is that most implementations try to hand-wave or generalize a lot of stuff, but not all programs need to use concurrency in the same manner.

I've been working on an actor model library on and off for awhile, and I get so frustrated with the schedulers. On Windows, multithreading with .net works pretty well if I use my own userspace scheduler. Linux is a scheduling disaster. If I let it run long enough, Mono segfaults in a way that I can't take the time to understand, and CFS will stall my long-running threads unevenly and at weird times, even if I peg them to a core. I've tried mucking with it but I usually end up making it worse :saddowns:

, when all I want is my few background threads to get equal shares. (Of course it technically doesn't matter if they get equal shares, as far as the logic goes, it would be nice though. It keeps one thread's message queue from overflowing into the others...)

While what I'm trying to do directly involve scheduling, I think the point I'm trying to make is that schedulers should start with a simple set of models and allow you to tune and combine them as you please, or perhaps offer several different models. I think that's the point of C#'s threading syntax, but it all becomes a good ol' threadpool iirc. It would be nice if they tried to make scheduling a little less 'magical'.

I haven't looked at Go, but I'm scared of new things ... after doing a little reading, does the 'go' keyword actually create a new thread or process every time? I didn't know this is what go was about, I thought it was just another new killer c++. The way it's set up reminds me of pi calculus.

As far as python goes, I learned python by making an IRC server, along with realizing that python isn't terribly good for it. Python == the REPL as far as I'm concerned, which it conceptually excels at.

And there's this, "The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores":
http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~sasha/papers/eurosys16-final29.pdf

dougdrums fucked around with this message at 19:36 on May 6, 2016

# ? May 6, 2016 19:31

Lonely Wolf: Jan 20, 2003; Will hawk false idols for heaps and heaps of dough.

Go is m:n threaded.

The go keyword creates a new "goroutine": a lightweight somewhat green thread-like, somewhat coroutine-like thing, which exists only in the OS process. It's similar to Erlang processes, though more primitive.

The Go runtime multiplexes and schedules goroutines onto multiple OS threads.

It's not a panacea to the terrors of concurrency and parallelism by any means. But it's nicer to deal with in practice than many approaches, though not as nice as others.

Like many things in Go it sits at this weird middle ground between high- and low-level. Not for everyone, but I like it.

# ? May 6, 2016 19:53

Subjunctive: Sep 12, 2006; ✨sparkle and shine✨

dougdrums posted:

And there's this, "The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores":
http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~sasha/papers/eurosys16-final29.pdf

Love this paper.

# ? May 6, 2016 19:54

dougdrums: Feb 25, 2005; CLIENT REQUESTED ELECTRONIC FUNDING RECEIPT (FUNDS NOW)

Subjunctive posted:

Love this paper.

I like that they only cite Torvalds to make him look like an rear end.

Also, when I was in the navy I used to read case studies on ship collisions and other nautical accidents to pass the time. It reminds me so much of a literal shipwreck, too many cooks over a long period of time and all.

dougdrums fucked around with this message at 20:14 on May 6, 2016

# ? May 6, 2016 20:00

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Lonely Wolf posted:

Go is m:n threaded.

The go keyword creates a new "goroutine": a lightweight somewhat green thread-like, somewhat coroutine-like thing, which exists only in the OS process. It's similar to Erlang processes, though more primitive.

The Go runtime multiplexes and schedules goroutines onto multiple OS threads.

It's not a panacea to the terrors of concurrency and parallelism by any means. But it's nicer to deal with in practice than many approaches, though not as nice as others.

Like many things in Go it sits at this weird middle ground between high- and low-level. Not for everyone, but I like it.

I thought I read something that said until recently the default number of threads used by the go runtime was "1", does anybody know what I'm thinking of?

# ? May 6, 2016 21:55

hyphz: Aug 5, 2003; Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.; Unlockable Ben

Grinding through some Java code written by a cow orker and find this at the end of every function.

If ("" != null) return X;
Throw new Exception("Missing return statement in function");

I have no idea why.

# ? May 6, 2016 22:03

Subjunctive: Sep 12, 2006; ✨sparkle and shine✨

hyphz posted:

Grinding through some Java code written by a cow orker and find this at the end of every function.

If ("" != null) return X;
Throw new Exception("Missing return statement in function");

I have no idea why.

Without the condition there would be an error for dead code, so that explains one part. I can't get all the way to understanding the rest.

# ? May 6, 2016 22:05

Series DD Funding: Nov 25, 2014; by exmarx

fritz posted:

I thought I read something that said until recently the default number of threads used by the go runtime was "1", does anybody know what I'm thinking of?

You're thinking of GOMAXPROCS, which controls the number of simultaneously executing goroutines and used to default to 1. The runtime still used multiple kernel threads because a goroutine inside a syscall or C code doesn't count as executing

# ? May 6, 2016 22:31

Lonely Wolf: Jan 20, 2003; Will hawk false idols for heaps and heaps of dough.

fritz posted:

I thought I read something that said until recently the default number of threads used by the go runtime was "1", does anybody know what I'm thinking of?

They changed the default from 1 to runtime.NumCPU() a year or two back, after a lot of work to improve the scheduler.

It's always been a tunable, though. Before the change, a lot of programs just started off with runtime.GOMAXPROCS(runtime.NumCPU()).

# ? May 6, 2016 22:32

piratepilates: Mar 28, 2004; So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.

Soricidus posted:

this is a reasonable approach in the case of a language with, uh, let's say "such a low barrier to entry".

It also makes a lot of sense for a language that was made in 1995 very quickly and hasn't required a good deal of multithreading until now.

Still not sure why they went with "webworkers" for the name though.

# ? May 6, 2016 22:49

Sedro: Dec 31, 2008

hyphz posted:

Grinding through some Java code written by a cow orker and find this at the end of every function.

If ("" != null) return X;
Throw new Exception("Missing return statement in function");

I have no idea why.

The compiler already checks for missing return statements, so we're converting compile time errors into runtime errors? As a bonus, we can infer that every function throws Exception

# ? May 7, 2016 00:45

necrotic: Aug 2, 2005; I owe my brother big time for this!

piratepilates posted:

Still not sure why they went with "webworkers" for the name though.

Can you use them outside of a browser? BrowserWorker doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

# ? May 7, 2016 01:38

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

There's webworker libraries for node.js, but actually using them sounds like a terrible idea.

# ? May 7, 2016 02:54

piratepilates: Mar 28, 2004; So I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it.

Doesn't look like nodejs has native webworker support (for whatever loving reason) but there are add-ons or what not to add them, also there's stuff like node-fibres and other add-ons for other threaded support.

# ? May 7, 2016 05:50

necrotic: Aug 2, 2005; I owe my brother big time for this!

piratepilates posted:

Doesn't look like nodejs has native webworker support (for whatever loving reason) but there are add-ons or what not to add them, also there's stuff like node-fibres and other add-ons for other threaded support.

Yeah, WebWorkers were designed for the browser. Someone implemented the API using threads for... reasons?

# ? May 7, 2016 05:59

Carbon dioxide: Oct 9, 2012

code:

Alexs-Macbook:~ alex$ woodoo
It's a weird tree.
Alexs-Macbook:~ alex$ sudo woodoo
Password:
     _              __
    / `\  (~._    ./  )
    \__/ __`-_\__/ ./
   _ \ \/  \   \ |_   __
 (   )  \__/ -^    \ /  \
  \_/ "  \  | o  o  |.. /  __
       \. --' ====  /  || /  \
         \   .  .  |---__.\__/
         /  :     /   |   |
         /   :   /     \_/
      --/ ::    (
     (  |     (  (____
   .--  .. ----**.____)
   \___/
Alexs-Macbook:~ alex$

I chuckled, okay?
_{The little script to make this work}

# ? May 7, 2016 07:51

Just Andi Now: Nov 8, 2009

Carbon dioxide posted:

[code]Alexs-Macbook:~ alex$ woodoo
It's a weird tree.
Alexs-Macbook:~ alex$ sudo woodoo

Least this could've done was spell the Pokemon name correctly. Unless a joke just went way over my head.

# ? May 7, 2016 11:22

karms: Jan 22, 2006; by Nyc_Tattoo; Yam Slacker

andipossess posted:

Least this could've done was spell the Pokemon name correctly. Unless a joke just went way over my head.

It's a good joke.

# ? May 7, 2016 14:21

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Suspicious Dish posted:

I spent an hour today tracking down memory leaks in Python code.
Python code:
def transform_tree(root):
    things = []

    def recurse(node):
        things.append(transform(node.data))
        for child in node.children:
            recurse(child)

     return things
Turns out this leaks — recurse holds onto things through a closure, and meaning it's a reference cycle. The cyclic GC in Python does not run very often.

I don't like Python very much.

im pretty sure that if it were possible to ban recursion completely in python, guido would have done it

# ? May 7, 2016 14:38

Obsurveyor: Jan 10, 2003

andipossess posted:

Least this could've done was spell the Pokemon name correctly. Unless a joke just went way over my head.

Remove space and read again.

# ? May 7, 2016 14:59

Carbon dioxide: Oct 9, 2012

It's actually sudowoodo without the second o but I couldn't be bothered the remove it figuring nobody would care.

# ? May 7, 2016 15:41

Zemyla: Aug 6, 2008; I'll take her off your hands. Pleasure doing business with you!

Carbon dioxide posted:

It's actually sudowoodo without the second o but I couldn't be bothered the remove it figuring nobody would care.

You assumed that a bunch of goons wouldn't be pedants about minor spelling errors? Big mistake.

# ? May 7, 2016 19:56

beuges: Jul 4, 2005; fluffy bunny butterfly broomstick

code:

            try {
        ........
            }
            catch (System.Data.Entity.Validation.DbEntityValidationException dbEx) {
                Exception raise = dbEx;
                foreach (var validationErrors in dbEx.EntityValidationErrors) {
                    foreach (var validationError in validationErrors.ValidationErrors) {
                        string message = string.Format("{0}:{1}",
                            validationErrors.Entry.Entity.ToString(),
                            validationError.ErrorMessage);
                        // raise a new exception nesting  
                        // the current instance as InnerException  
                        raise = new InvalidOperationException(message, raise);
                    }
                }
                return;
            }

He came so close...

# ? May 10, 2016 11:06

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# ? Jun 1, 2024 19:11

Cuntpunch: Oct 3, 2003; A monkey in a long line of kings

This isn't even the same person as the last horror. But, like the other one, also has 5+ years of experience and is considered to fill a mid-senior seat!

code:

//Variables obfuscated and simplified
var check = myData.Name == "Foo" || myData.Name == "Bar" ? true : false;

Corollary: I asked about this pattern of using a ternary and after 10 minutes of trying to explain I was confused by the apparent redundancy, the final word was "If you say it will work, then I guess you can try that" as though I was missing out on some fundamental truth of how code works.

Programmers: Huge, fragile egos.

Cuntpunch fucked around with this message at 17:24 on May 10, 2016

# ? May 10, 2016 13:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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