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Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

I am an okay programming I guess, but I dont care about it enough to spend any significant amount of my free time learning about programming and/or contributing to open source projects. So Im probably a C at best

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Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

Silver Alicorn posted:

I think maybe the community has gotten better, I haven't really paid attention since I stopped following slashdot

the problem with programming education is there's so much stuff that's non-obvious and counter-intuitive and it doesn't make "sense' until you've been browbeaten with it enough that you pretend it does, and at that point you still have no idea how to explain it to anyone else

best example I can think of is pointers. what is a pointer? a variable that points to another variable. this is a circular definition but it's what's in the books.

pointers didn't make sense to me until I started playing with assembly. need to store a string of text, or other multi-word data somewhere? put it somewhere in memory and then write that memory address down somewhere. now you can look up what's at that address and change the data, or you can change the address too maybe. it's like a reference of a memory address that points... at your data. a pointer. C-like languages make this more confusing because it can be hard to tell when you need to "dereference" a pointer or just pass the pointer as-is. You can think of a pointer as a variable that stores an address but you need to have some fairly precise understanding of what variables even are to understand why pointers are useful in the first place and it's just generally not taught
idk I didn't have trouble grasping it maybe ur profs are bad at their jobs

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

ShadowHawk posted:

If your job description included the word "rock star" when you were applying then you're probably a real developer

last year I got a job through my university work-study program. I made it clear in the interview that I had no prior exposure to the stuff they were using but they hired me anyway. they liked the cut of my jib or something so they hired me and just kinda threw me into it with no support or supervision

after like 2 months of not knowing what the gently caress they were all like "oh uh we hoped youd be performing at the same level as an experienced pro by now"

the phrase "rock star" was bandied about. idk how they expected to find rock stars for the kinda money they were payin

Juul-Whip fucked around with this message at 07:26 on May 8, 2013

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

I have a friend who recently graduated from CS and he thought he could start running he own xmpp server by uploading the files to Uploaded.net. He didn't seem to grasp the difference between uploading files to a computer and executing code on a computer. How this person managed to achieve a bachelors in CS I don't know

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

chumpchous posted:

i dunno when i was doing manual labor i was so tired all the time the only thing i could stress about was my job. now i have tons of surpluss energy but no surplus motivation and my job isn't that stressful so instead i stress about how generally unhappy + unhealthy + terrible my life is.

smoke weed

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

Cold on a Cob posted:

why is there nothing like notepad++ for osx?

Textmate 2 fits the bill, and it's free now

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

Plastic Snake posted:

allman style is for c#

last summer I worked at a C# shop which swears by K&R style. but nobody could figure out how to stop ReSharper autocorrecting to Allman style. So every time I checked in code I had to K&R-ize it first

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

prefect posted:

:confused: i see it in the resharper options, languages > c# > formatting style > braces layout

Yeah, tried that, they had some other plugin that was loving it probably. It was a bad job

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

In the Stanford course on iTunes U, the guy says to enable a breakpoint for all exceptions and to just have that on all the time. Is there any situation where I would not want to do this? Most of the projects I've looked at don't have this breakpoint.

edit: talkin bout Xcode

Juul-Whip fucked around with this message at 00:36 on May 18, 2013

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

It is literally a "break whenever an exception is thrown" breakpoint so if you have an exception somewhere thats crashing your program you can turn this on and it shows you the exact line of code instead of crashing and throwing up gobbledygook. The stanford prof recommends to have it on all the time. You can always disable it if it gets in the way of your regular testing but it seems like a lot of devs don't even know this is a feature. Or maybe it's training wheels for noobs that will gently caress you up in unforeseen ways.

Juul-Whip fucked around with this message at 01:04 on May 18, 2013

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

Yeah I don't remember seeing a lot of try-catch blocks in the iOS projects I've looked at. It seems that people prefer to guard against them happening in the first place.

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

couple years ago I did a huge ~10,000 line java project in uni with 12 other guys and we abused the loving hell out of exceptions. every file had at least a couple try-catch blocks. it was atrocious and the prof rightly called us out on it

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

vs and xcode are the only tolerable ides. only one of them runs on a tolerable OS

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

obj c is kinda a silly PL but it is necessary to develop mass-market software that you can actually monetize and more or less guaranteed to work on the hardware. and xcode the only IDE that doesnt make me want to gouge my eyes out with a plastic spoon

only apple could come up with an IDE that is actually kinda nice to use and look at

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

vapid cutlery posted:

what's silly about it
Im inclined to think the entire message passing concept is apple being different for the sake of being different. (NB: I realize this is not the actual reason why obj-c has messaging but to someone raised on c/++ c# and java it is just so very peculiar.) they just get turned into function calls at compile time anyway so wtf

Juul-Whip fucked around with this message at 08:29 on May 31, 2013

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

Doc Block posted:

No they don't, at least not in the way that you mean. They get turned into calls to the C function objc_msgSend(), which sends the object the message.

The message passing is what makes Objective-C such a dynamic language.

For instance, you can add methods to objects at runtime because calling methods is really just sending messages instead of making direct function calls like in c++/c#/whatever. And you can ask an object if it responds to a given message so that you can, say, use a method added in a certain version of iOS but still maintain backward compatibility without having to remember what specific version of iOS it was that added the method.

You can forward messages to other objects, or even make an object that consumes all messages.

Message passing is one of the things that I like about Objective-C.
yeah, I agree with this, it was just all a bit strange and foreign to me at first but now I'm all

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

in obj-C is there any particular reason to use your own instance variables and methods instead of just dropping a @property in there? they're not doing anything fancy with the accessors except return some value so im confused why they dont just use @properties.

Juul-Whip fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Jun 17, 2013

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Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

yo is it just me or is git the absolute worst loving version control system

also is there a decent way to merge pbxproj yet because jesus christ

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