There's nothing wrong with a good old BASIC language. VB doesn't deserve its bad reputation. It's more capable of building a proper end user focused program than Python is. That makes it stronger than Python.

You get it. Bad programmers like alternative languages because they don't have to learn anything real and can just keep moving their pathetic skills from one trendy new language to another. It reminds me of how women work in tech. They don't want to go deep. They just want to sound forward thinking. The core languages will live on a long time because they are solid. That's good for real programmers because we can truly immerse ourselves in them and become experts rather than follow the bullshit trendy languages that will go away soon.

Why would C/C++ need to be replaced? Only programmers who lack in depth skills would be slowed down by these languages. Scripting languages are good for scripting, and only scripting. They lack the power to do things at the low levels and have no user interface other than the command line (generally). They are good for automating administrative tasks and cobbling together some simple routines for repetitive work, but they can't build a complete end-user focused program.

Ultimately a language's worth is determined by how it can be used to build programs and systems that anyone can use and does the things they need it to do in a seamless (to the user) manner. No end user wants to muck about with the command line. No end user wants to have a clunky interface that requires them to try to remember complicated commands or draconian rules. End users want simple and understandable interfaces. Languages like C/C++/C#, Java, Visual Basic and Delphi can give them that with ease because they are fully fledged languages with the ability to do heavy lifting and make usable interfaces for humans. To a different extent, the combo of HTML, CSS and JS have done the same, albeit these "languages" are extremely limited on access to local resources and operating system functions. They are second class languages for that reason.

Python and other languages like it lack the full coverage that Java, C langs and even VB offer because they must use a bunch of cobbled together projects to build UIs or make the program self contained and easily installed. Sure those other languages mean some form of vendor lock in, but it's time to put to rest the silly notion that that is a bad thing. Vendor lock in allows a language to mature and strengthen. Linux would not have gone far if it didn't have the strong foundation of vendor locked UNIX to build on and Microsoft Windows to copy for features. Linux would have stayed a curiosity aimed at hardcore enthusiasts if it didn't have a path to walk in that was made by vendor lock in. FOSS spread the lies that closed source is bad. Open source has suffered because of that lie. People want to have a stable and mature product and vendor lock in gives them that (except for MS these days who fucked up by having pajeets do the coding and rapid release schedules). The same goes for languages. Go or Groovy won't keep me employed, but C, Java and C# will. Hate it all you want, but that's reality. I can go get a Java job with ease today or ten years down the road. Can the same thing hold true with Python?

A lot of programmers claim to write in [insert trendy language name here] when they mostly are just dabbling in it or writing personal tools and scripts in it. The reason the top languages stay relatively unchanged is due to those languages being the backbones of real world programs and systems. Java keeps its stranglehold as the top language because it is used in many financial systems that will not be going away any time soon. C and C++ are what most real programs are written in and will also hold on forever. Up and comers like Python only take a top spot because they get a lot of play in very small systems or are used as glue for systems written in other languages. It's kind of artificial to say Python has reached a true first-class system language status when it is only used as parts of the larger machine instead of the primary language. The rest of the languages on the list are all just here and there languages with the popularity driven by certain sectors or niche capabilities. No one is writing the next big game in Rust. No one is using Objective-C outside of Apple development. Visual Basic is just legacy code maintenance. This Tiobe list has always been skewed and hardly reflects the true state of programming language use. I've never liked the way it portrays things when there are obvious flaws in it.

Any white space significant language is a disaster. Who would purposely do such a thing in the modern age?

Well the real king is actually Assembler, er, actually machine language but aint no one got time for that. It all comes down to good old Assembler no matter what sits on top of what.

Java, PHP, Ruby, PERL, JavaScript, LISP, Pascal, C++, ObjectiveC, Swift, GO, Kotlin, C#, Rust, Scheme, Eelang, Haskell, Python is the hottest programming language in the world in $_insert_current_year_$!

Yeah, enjoy it while it lasts. Language popularity comes and goes. In the end only one will continue on as the king: C

I'm well aware of that.

Hey @virge. I've got a challenge for you and your internet archive since 1992. I know of some content that was purged from the internet by Microsoft back in the early 2000s. Microsoft used to have a series of columns called "Microsoft Voices" which they published on MSDN/SiteBuilder Network site. Some articles around the 1998 time frame from a specific former Microsoft employee have been purged for "legal" reasons. There are no archives of the content in existence today. If you truly have the internet backed up since 1992, then search your archive for an article titled "Schedule Chicken" by Victor Stone. His column was called "Stone's Way". Post your results so we can see what your archive can do.

Jews like you don't care what jews say, so it's not surprising at all. Too bad for you that you are the only jew in this thread.

You're such a liar. You don't do it to annoy people. You do it to hide. No one believes you. And why exactly would it annoy jews? It's not like you're saying anything they care about so why would it matter to them. Keep on lying like a woman does.

Trying to pretend people give a shit about make-believe Internet posts is not only assuming they're stupid, but it's also an extremely Jewish thing to do

You seem to care much more than anyone else here on Voat. That makes you a stupid jew according to your analysis. Typical jew trick.

I didn't make this post. But since you brought it up, remember all those "Type X" posts you made accusing people of being jew shills of various types? Yeah, I remember although your post history was mostly shoahed to hide your treachery. That's so very jewish of you. It's interesting to note the posts you left behind. My history is completely intact. I don't fear Voat transparency, even retroactive. You fear it completely because you would be exposed as a paid shill with many alts. I say bring on the Voat voting transparency and let's compare who is the real shill here. I will be vindicated totally because I have only one account. What will transparency show for you, jew shill?

I don't have to be good at it. I just have to waste your time. Unlike you, I'm not paid to do anything on Voat so I don't have to meet any quotas. Now go ahead and do your usual methods and call for backup because this job is too hard for a woman. Reeeeeee!

New mission, LOL! Your handlers must have decided you failed your last one and gave you another chance. You suck at everything you do, Moshe. I guess I'll just get back to my own mission to make you expose yourself as a subversive plant here on Voat. You're just a LARPing roastie who is bored because you hit the wall and no one will fuck you, not even Crensch.

Why are you still here, liar? You said you were leaving yet you came back to get more attention and play the victim. Only a jew paid shill would do what you are doing yet you accuse WR of being one. That's the classic jew projection at work. Type 11 behavior for sure.

To add to OP's advice, please also attempt to figure things out even just a little bit if you do ask for help. If you've done nothing at all and expect a senior programmer to do your work for you at your desk, then expect them to bash your face in. Your attempt does not need to be 100% successful, but it should be more than simply doing nothing at all and expecting complete help. You will not learn if you do not try to solve your own problems. We don't want to do your job. We learned to use our resources and knowledge pools so you need to do so as well in order to grow as a programmer. If you don't we will bash your face in.

But the companies that need us old timers the most see us as "too expensive" and "doesn't work well in teams" to bring us on. They would rather just hire more useless pajeet consultants and try to work around their SJW/diversity hire dumbasses so they can keep on virtue signalling themselves into oblivion. I won't touch any place that uses Agile or some other stupid time wasting methodology. I'd rather just watch these train wrecks unfold and keep laughing as I do my work the way I want to do it.

Glad to hear you're getting the hang of it. As with most things we do in life, doing it often helps drive your ability. At some point a switch turns on and you feel like you just became enlightened. That's when you know you had to fail a lot to learn to do it right. Keep going and good luck with the learning. That eureka moment is just past the next few mountains.

Sounds like you're new to programming. Stick to it and your errors will go down. C# can be a pretty good language if you learn it's nuances. At some point you will reach critical mass on your skills and write good code with ease. It takes time and perseverance so keep coding. You'll learn the best if you work towards solving a specific problem rather than just tinkering.

I don't think you understand how programming or the internet works. You would need much more than a new browser or search engine to make this work. Start learning to program in a real language (not JavaScript) and you will start understanding how making browsers is a pretty big undertaking. A simple text and image browser like the original Netscape browser would not be too difficult, but modern browsers are expected to handle much, much more than simple marked up text and static images. I wouldn't want to try pleasing people today with their high expectations.

It should be more like this. Why'd you make it complicated?

LEARN TO JOURNALIST

Here's a different take on this:

print("\n(((" + input("Type name of 'fellow white person' article author.") + ")))\n")

LEARN TO JOURNALIST.

I bet he would want to make everything static too so there would never be a need to instantiate a class object. Combined with everything being public, this would completely destroy OOP.

That code is not valid. She mixed attributes with the convention for style and made that tag fail parsing.

Yes, just pull the switch. I wish people would stop telegraphing their intent and simply act on them instead.Action is what we need not the threat of acting.

I'm no longer a fan of cross platform development. While it means extra work, I believe it is better to choose the right tools/languages for each platform and get the best out of them. Cross platform development just means we get mediocre results on multiple platforms with extra headaches throughout the software's life cycle. It was a nice experiment but in the end it just made things bad and rewarded sloppy development practices. We lost a lot chasing cross platform development, endless frameworks and complex toolchains. Give me a good C compiler any day and let me build it right rather than just right now.

All of the above.

Does it garbage collect Java itself? That would be very exciting to me if it did.

This is why I have been against developers jumping on the "standards" bandwagon. Sure it is good to have a common set of accepted and proven standards for developing applications and websites, but even Open Source standards have been co-opted by companies like Jewgle and turned into tools to help spread their influence and control. I have always been a proponent for developers creating new things even if it means a lot of competing methods, protocols and tools. By having a large and varied pool of things to use, we avoid any one technology from being taken over by a megacorporation for their nefarious purposes. We also improve our skills as programmers since we have to think bigger and better instead of simply bolting on the most popular pieces and writing the same mundane code they lead to. It's time we take back our internet and break free from the "standards" that are forcing us to be slaves and weak coders. We need innovative programmers again. We need to stop these threats to the future of coding. Be original and creative. Roll your own my fellow coders. It's the only way we win.

Use this opportunity to grow. If you can learn a lot about pushing memory around in C++, you can pretty much land good C++ jobs any time you want. Programming in C++ is more about thinking about how to do things efficiently. Other languages accept a lot of slop but C++ will teach you to tighten things up. Once you have the basics of moving memory around you will have a better grasp at programming than most other programmers working in higher level languages.Take this time to learn the tricks the more seasoned programmers you work with know. If they have any grey beards around, definitely pick their brains as much as you can. The world need more good programmers with old school skills. You can get there if you apply yourself. As for the degree, learn the ins-and-outs of C++ well and you won't ever need a piece of paper to prop you up. You can do it. Just open your mind and code like mad to get the feel of it.

I see no problem with the two lines of code here. They are efficient and get the job done. Aside from long line length there is nothing problematic about it. Moment.js would be a waste for such a small task and it sounds like it's not even up to the task anyway. He's an idiot.

I mostly work on web and desktop with some mobile here and there. I'm also full stack end-to-end because my group doesn't really split up into distinct areas of work so we all do whatever is necessary on every part of the technology stack. I have an embedded development background but that was a long time ago on CPUs like the Z80 and MC6800 and I haven't touched that in about 2 decades.

Early on in my programming career I used to code around the user by trying to think of every scenario they could throw at my software and make sure I never let them mess up. It was a time consuming process but the users were happy because they could get around just fine and most any error possible was handled. Now that I am long in the tooth I write programs that steer my users so they can't get into trouble in the first place. The software flows much better and I don't have to think about what kind of trouble they can get into because I make sure they can only do what is proper. This has made me a very efficient project completer and my users don't complain about my software getting in their way. Instead they ask for more features since I made their job easier and they get more out of the software so they integrate it into their work more. It's a far cry from the mess these young and still wet behind the ears programmers produce with their buggy and convoluted frameworks and tool chains. I keep it simple, keep it real and school those young dipshits left and right because they get caught in implementation rather than making a good system. Mature programmers who took their licks and learned make great mentors but these kids think they know everything because they are up on all the latest fads in coding. They don't realize the art and science of writing software hasn't changed one bit at the fundamental level and frameworks only serve to "dumb-it-down" so their meager skills can keep up with programmers who actually know what's up. I love it when they finally get that "a-ha" moment and understand that you don't need a full framework to do something when five lines of simple code gives you the equivalent result with no overhead. If only more programmers could learn from the old grey beards and understand that we aren't getting better by building on more layers of crap. The old ways are still very much relevant and they will continue to be. Users are not the enemy. Frameworks and trendy fads are the enemy.

I never thought I'd be wishing that Steve Ballmer were still heading Microsoft. Nadella sucks so bad that he makes Ballmer look like a fucking genius and innovator. Fuck Nadella with a cactus for destroying more developer confidence. We're heading deeper into a technological stone age with all the stifling that's happening in the industry. The golden age of software is nothing more than a faint memory now. Sad.

It will still compile, but automatically the program is granted root privilege for some unknown reason.

Well the default int value of 0 applies pretty well here since she is being extremely infantile.

She left out the case for age >= 30 && isFat && wallHit(true).

We don't need a program or algorithm to do this. We just need people to stop catering to mentally ill retards who want to spread degeneracy. I'm pretty certain that you can't provide an accurate model for what you're wanting to do since there are so many variables in the mix and no way to collect enough measurable data to feed the model. Acting on a flawed model is not better than not acting at all and may actually be worse. It's better that people just stop allowing the degenerates to spread in the first place.

I think you just found 11 bytes of code you could shrink down to 0 bytes.

I don't know a single houseplant that has fallen for this. Give them more credit.

These days I'm lucky if I get to code 10 hours in a week. Most of my time is spent in meetings or liaising with the business. I also spend a lot of time helping the less experienced programmers get through their assigned tasks so the the more senior programmers can stay focused and code exclusively. Being the gray beard in my team makes my time too valuable to waste on coding apparently. I miss the days of marathon coding sessions and pushes for looming release dates. Now I just try to stay on top of the work of my subordinates and take guilty pleasure in the few moments I get to write something, er, anything. Hell, I was recently beaming with joy that I got to write some fucking VBA code in Outlook to bring the damn reminder windows to the front since one of our GPOs fucked with the window titlebar flashing count which causes Outlook to not throw non-modal dialogs to topmost window order. I was happy I still remembered enough Win32 API to do it but the whole purpose was so I wouldn't miss meetings that keep me from coding. FML.

Managers do this to make their jobs seem more complicated than they really are thereby justifying why they fail to deliver on projects. When a manager throws an untested new project/development methodology into the fray, they are able to throw their subordinates under the bus when the project fails because they can say the team just wasn't able to step up to the plate like all these other companies did in their white papers and case studies. This deflects the calls of incompetence away from the manager and onto the development team. To the manager types it isn't possible to fail under this methodology because it "worked at Google" and surely the team just sucks because they're not as good as Google. The managers and execs agree and the team is then outsourced to pajeets for incompetence and money savings. It's just the way the game is played now but it's not ever going to be a solution.

I've been good in software for 30 years but there's no way for one programmer to topple Mount Open Source with its misguided proponents and megacorporations funneling money into bad technologies. The momentum and entrenchment for this bullshit is too great and the problem really begins with the OS and hardware platforms so I would have to create a new unfucked processor, a new OS, a new OS API, a new compiler, a new language, a new set of protocols and finally a new browser with new programming interfaces. What you're saying is equivalent to making your own new government and nation that no one will recognize as sovereign or emigrate to because you have nothing substantial to work with and no army to force your ways. If you can pull all of this off, well I'll gladly do those other things and give your nation a better alternative to WebASM.

JavaScript is a cluster fuck. I liken people who think it's a great scripting language to those who thought VBSript was a great scripting language, which says plenty. It's no wonder to me that the SoyBoi generation loves this fucked up language since it has no real identity and constantly transforms into a more cucked language by the day. JavaScript is single-handedly destroying the art of programming. Combined with HTML, CSS and the endless cesspool of frameworks out there, we're heading backwards in innovation and computer science. Downvoat me to hell but you know this is true. I hope some day we can fix all of this before we lose all the veteran knowledge of pre-web programming times.

Do it harder next time so it will halt and catch fire.

They claim to be open, but the reality is they are still controlled by the original developer/company. It's like the whole HTML5 video in the browser thing. Do you have the ability to go and change the source of Chrome or Firefox to replace the codecs with ones of your choosing? Sure you could fork it, but is that really any different than just making another competing browser? Open Source has proven to be anything but open. It's become a term that has lost its original intended meaning and the FOSS community is a ragtag mess of competing ports, distros and dead end projects. The idea of Open Source was grand and noble and I was a big proponent of it. The idealism gave way to the stark reality where we sacrificed innovation and forward thinking for "stop complaining it's free and if you don't like it, go fork it yourself". Now we have bloated browsers, shitty office apps that haven't improved in 10 years and the Gimp which is still crap. Linux has endless distros that compete for popularity points but always wait to see what MS does next instead of blazing trails. I'm no MS fan these days but fuck the FOSS world has made me wish we had strong closed source competition again. There was real innovation when money was on the line. We need that again.

So is everyone going to hate on it like they did with Microsoft's ActiveX technology? It's tragically funny to me to see everything MS did back in the early days of the web and were ridiculed for have come back in some new fashion and embraced as the "next big thing". MS gave us IE specific CSS and people freaked out. Webkit and Mozilla did it too and it was cheered on. MS gave us the Structured Graphics Control to display vector graphics in the browser. Everyone hated it. SVG in the browser and suddenly it's okay. Nothing is new and this "innovation" is just as bad as anything before it, but hey, let's be hypocrites and embrace it when it's no better than ActiveX, JAVA or Flash.

MS Chrome Effects :( -> WebGL :D

Structured Graphics Control :( -> SVG :D

ActiveX :( -> WebAssembly :D

Dynamic HTML Behaviors :( -> HTML Controls :D

Customized CSS Extensions :( -> Customized CSS Extensions :D

My experiences with Agile were the opposite. Agile became more about the code delivery than meeting the requirements of the projects. The older JAD/RAD model worked along those same lines but with actual user involvement because they were embedded in the process. It seems that the attempts to improve on that model ended up turning it into something less effective by applying trendy new project management garbage and endless sprints, meetings and deadlines. Sometimes I think the old Waterfall method may have been closer to the ideal for how a software project should work but there are too many people who oppose it or call it a text book example of how not to run a software project. I'm afraid to see what comes after Agile has run its course. I'm sure it won't be better though.

You have really nailed down the essence of what makes good programmers good. Your point on spending a majority of the time on understanding the problem is key to the success of a software project. By understanding the problem, the workflow of the users and the users themselves, coding the software just becomes a mundane process where you're just writing the logical rules that translate into the work the users do. I have preached this process for many years both to programmers and the business customers alike. I always try to get the coders and users together to run through things manually or at least deeply discuss the way the work is to be done so we can capture better requirements and actually determine what is needed rather than what they think they need. My most successful projects were done this way where we met with actual users and business people to hammer it all out before one line of code was ever written. We all knew we did it right when the users understood the software without the need for training and there were no feature changes needed or logic bugs to fix. I wish Software Analyst positions were more common in today's programming world. They are the ones who would make this happen and act as the liaison between the coder and the business so that the programmers can be shielded a bit more from the customers since we all know they are not always compatible with personalities or ways of thinking. The modern software world could learn a lot from the old ways since this rapid release, Agile and "eternal beta" mentality we have today is definitely not working better than what it was meant to replace.

Oh gee, thanks. Now there's going to be another wave of new C (or whatever) variant programming languages written by people who think they can solve the problems of other languages by writing new ones. Just what we needed! I think compiler classes should only be taught after a rigorous course of delving into improving existing languages and understanding that we should hone our skills and truly learn a language before declaring them obsolete and making new ones. No one takes the time to master a language anymore and instead just jumps on the trendy languages of the day and whatever frameworks have been cobbled together to "enhance" them. Constantly churning as we do with new languages makes for some really sad programming skills. Lets get back to mastery instead of mediocrity.

As someone who had to work with Visual Basic 1.0 through 6.0 in the 90s, it's not a compiler error, except for all those times it was a compiler error. The VB (non .Net) compiler was notorious for fucking up shit inexplicably if you were pushing VB to its limits with Win32 API calls. Hell, on a good day you could compile your project and get an EXE file of a particular file size then compile it again and get an EXE with a different file size. No code changes in between yet the compiler somehow took a completely different route on optimization (I say that loosely as the VB compiler was not so good with optimization). So it's never the compiler, unless it's an old VB compiler.

I'm going to strangle you with my long, gray beard.

To pull a quote from A L I E N S:

RIPLEY: Hicks, I'm not going to wind up like those others. You'll take care of it won't you, it if comes to that?

HICKS: If it comes to that, I'll do us both. Let's see that it doesn't. Here, I'd like to introduce you to a close personal friend of mine.

   He picks up his pulse-rifle and with the casually precise
   movements of long practice he snaps open the bolt, drops
   out the magazine and hands it to her.

Congratulations! You are now a seasoned programmer!

The anger you are feeling towards frameworks and trendy web bullshit is normal once you cross the line into being a seasoned (or salty) coder. You have recognized that this over-reliance on frameworks is complete insanity and you would be better off just writing your own lightweight and purpose specific code instead of including eight frameworks and dependencies, a convoluted tool chain and right-out-of-the-box obsolescence. You still have a couple of major tests to overcome on your road to greatness though: 1.) abstaining from making your own framework that works the way it should and 2.) resisting the urge to try to convince the less experienced coders that you're right and they're wasting their time. If you can avoid banging your head against these walls and instead just making things work the way you want them to, then you will grow a long, gray beard and will basque in the glow of your own enlightenment. You're on the golden path now. Follow it with confidence, my son.

Mostly it's a lot of little things like not breaking down complex tasks into smaller more logical operations, failing to recognize that they are writing the same code in multiple places instead of writing one function/method for it, horrible variable names and writing really convoluted code that takes too much time for another programmer to decipher. Other issues include relying heavily on error handling (try/catch/finally) when they could have avoided needing error trapping by refactoring things so most errors could be avoided in the first place and wanting to include huge frameworks/libraries to do things that could be accomplished with a few lines of builti-in code. Debugging skills are often lacking since they know the basics but not the real world practices so they tend to spend too much time stepping through non-issues before they get to the location of the real problem. If they are having to create any relational databases, most of them have very poor db skills out of college and make some horrible database designs that repeat data, use mutable data as keys or size data types too small for the range of data that will eventually be stored (e.g. a numeric column sized as an int where the data will exceed int's capacity in the future). Every just out of school coder will bring their own set of strange and problematic practices or styles. Many of them will no make comments in their code or will haphazardly add methods, classes or structures when a little more thinking would show them they are unneeded. I try to help them adopt a clean and logical coding style that focuses on maintainability rather than complexity or fanciness. If I end up helping one of these newbs sort out their own code from six months ago because they don't remember why they wrote it that way, then I use that as a teaching moment to stress the importance of leaving yourself a guide in the code through simpler more atomic coding and comments to explain the reasoning behind the why and how. After a year or so they usually correct their habits and write better code because they are thinking more about the process rather than simply writing code. That's the hardest part to teach. So many young upstarts just want to starting writing code before they've thought about the requirements or the process. They struggle through code reviews and testing because of that so I try to help them not be demoralized by a bad code walk through so they will learn more rather than simply mope or complain that they were reviewed harshly. It's a mixed bag and I've run into all kinds of things with young programmers. Some have the potential to move on to great things with a little help up front but others never mature much. It's a function of their motivation to learn and a willingness to understand that it takes time to get there. I always love it when one of my protege programmers has their eureka moment and realizes that they've advanced to the next level because they just discovered on their own that the things I taught them really do pay off down the road. That's usually when I tell them it's time for them to start thinking more like a mentor than a student so they can continue the cycle.

Well my experiences can't really be extrapolated to everywhere. I have worked mostly inside corporations and some contract jobs but it is surprising to me how many female programmers I have worked with. My area is not a huge city like New York or LA so it's really a bit of an anomaly to have the experiences I have had with female programmers. I can only think of two or three I would put on a list of outstanding coders but that's more than most people could probably have on their list. The best one was very code intuitive and code learn new things very quickly. I think she went into management after I moved on to another job so it was a terrible loss of good in the trenches talent. Though she was the best female, it is like comparing men and women tennis players. The top woman player is ranked far below the majority of male players. There is a big gap between her programming talent and the guy above her. The top guy on my list, who exceeds me by a sizable measure to be honest, is a freakin' programming god. He is 100% self taught and can master damn near any programming technology in incredibly short time periods. I've never met anyone else like him or even close to his abilities so he's a true stand out.

Unless they move into management due to good ass kissing skills. There they make everything a mess which keeps old guys like me well employed.

I've worked with about a dozen female programmers who clearly had 100% self taught skills including two who came from completely non-technical backgrounds. Some were better than others but they clearly had what it took to get hired and succeed. The majority of male programmers I have worked with were school corrupted and required extensive breaking to turn into useful coders. Good senior programmers are useful in fixing the school fuck ups but it's a tedious process and requires a lot of patience. I'm 100% self taught so I will invest time and effort in these young ones if I see they have the proper learning attitude, male or female.

I think this video is off the mark in many ways, primarily by assuming development is only happening in companies like FB and other tech related businesses. I have been in the game for a long time and have done very well in non-tech companies who have internal development needs. While most of my knowledge is outdated due to the march of technological advances, I keep relevant by choosing which technologies to learn and by having good project management skills as well. I don't jump on fads like most jr level upstarts and I don't waste time on new and unproven languages that will be dead in a few years. I focus on strong and maintainable code that meets the business' needs. I usually get exclusive development of special projects that need quick turnaround since the other greener developers would take three times as long and with 100 times more errors. We over 35 years old developers who don't transition to management (by choice in my case) get where we do by being highly capable and we can keep going as long as there are jr level fuck ups making sure we will have jobs by making crappy code. Plus I get the advantage in that I have the technical say in which young upstart gets hired when a opening comes up. Try to pull some young developers are better bullshit with me and you'll be sent back to the job search. Being a senior programmer has its privileges.

It's a nice little utility script for sure but I think the built-in JS features could pull off most of this library's methods with one line of plain old JS code. Split(), Join() and various array operations will accomplish these same things without the need to bring in another script dependency. If this lib was incorporated into a larger and broader lib that provided other string, number, array and date functions then it might be great for general purpose use and something you could add as boilerplate to your web projects. On its own though it does not offer enough functionality to warrant loading yet another script.

This is a pretty good learning project idea! Not too complex and not too easy. It will teach file I/O, handling graphics transforms and repeating operations over an arbitrary group of work items. Some stretch goals to this to bring additional learning opportunities once the base program is written could be:

• User settable scaling sizes, rotation and/or color depth
• Changing the graphics format (encoding a JPG to PNG for instance)
• Adding a watermark
• Keeping the user interface responsive and showing progress while the magic is happening

Really advanced stuff could be multithreaded operation and automatic thumbnail production when new files are added to the source folder.

Hmm, I'm kind of interested in writing this now. It's different from the normal coding work I do and it sounds like a fun way to see how sharp my skills are after a long time away from desktop application development.

Make an Android app using C# on Mac

Five years ago no one would ever have thought these words could be in the same sentence and not be total nonsense. It's truly a bizarre world we live in today.

What can we achieve? Nothing. We already have too many fragmented languages and syntax/dialects that add nothing significant to programming. There are tons of languages and frameworks that have short lifespans and we're not concentrating on making established languages and syntax better and more complete. This project and everything like it is not helping.

I didn't say know how to repair or maintain a car. I said build a car. Knowing how a computer works from a basic level and operating software, even as a power user, does not require programming knowledge. You might think it is lazy AF but having spent 25 years as a programmer I can tell you most users want to do their non-programming related job rather than learn to program. Computers are tools for users to enable them to do their job or make it easier. Adding programming to that mix is a waste of their time (and everyone else's for that matter) because they will either not learn it or worse still build Rube Goldberg-esque software contraptions that become hazards to all who come in contact with them. I'm all for people learning things but programming for non-programmers is not necessary. Do you know how to spin, weave, sew and alter textiles/clothing since you wear clothes? As an engineer I'm sure you have knowledge of the concepts but that does not make you a tailor/seamstress and neither should you be expected to be. I'd rather people learn skills that actually translate to everyday use for them like cooking and managing money. That is what we need to teach kids.

You shouldn't need to know how to build a car to use one. It is a programmer's job to make sure users don't need to learn programming.

I couldn't agree more. Programming is not like cooking; everyone should learn to cook because we all eat but you don't need to program to use a computer. We need a few good coders not vast amounts of terrible ones.

Well...Visual Basic versions prior to the .Net releases contained a setting that allowed you to programmatically set the lower bound for arrays. You could choose 0 or 1 as the lowest bound so perhaps this guy is just an old school VB programmer who used OPTION BASE 1, but that's still retarded. In my many years of pre-.Net VB programming I only encountered one other programmer using this feature but it was for a legitimate use as it was part of a legacy mainframe interface program that had records starting at 1.

VB/VBA Option Base Statement

Glad to help you find a legit way to get Visual Studio. The Community Edition will probably have everything you will need including Xamarin if you're needing to build Android and iOS apps with a great IDE and debugging tools.

What's wrong with you using the Community Edition which is free? It has nearly all the functionality of VS Pro except for some Enterprise features you probably don't need.

If they kill it then in a few years time old programmer Goats like me who have tons of years experience with older languages/technologies will be making bank like the Cobol guys did with Y2K. I haven't seriously programmed in any version of VB in many years but I know I could get right back into it if the gig and money are right. This could be a lucrative move for us old guys.

Well I fall 4 years short of the 34 year mark. I count decades because it's less intimidating for younger developers to hear 3 decades rather than 30 years when you're introducing yourself and giving background info on your experience. I still act like a teenager/20-something because I may have grown old but I never really grew up. It's more fun being young at heart. I did try the management path for a while including becoming a product manager but I missed the action and hated the useless (to me) social pandering needed to get interface with upper management. I'm in the trenches again where I'm happy so I will probably stay here until I can't do it any more. Why be boring and old when I can be old and still have shitloads of fun doing cool things?

When I started programming it was in the before time when PCs were still fighting to gain the top spot. My first paying programming gig (1986) involved writing Z-80 assembly code for embedded microcontrollers used in data acquisition on fuel pumps. I wrote code on a Morrow Designs MD-11 and a Kaypro II and burned the resulting compiled code to EPROMs for the microcontrollers. I didn't touch a PC (IBM compatible) till 1989 when I did some projects on commission in QuickBASIC. From there I bounced around the 90s programming in DBase, Borland C, Visual Basic, Delphi and VC++ (MFC/ATL). In the more recent times I've settled into C# mostly because it's easy to get work in my area with that. I miss the old days of Win32 programming where it was you and the bare metal but it's nice to make things happen quickly and with less hassle. I still have a special place in my heart for ActionScript and Adobe Flex because that was a fun language/framework that let my creative side play with my technical side and make awesome stuff. I despise modern web programming but that's a much bigger discussion that doesn't fit here. I've forgotten more programming things than most of my colleagues have learned so I feel weird and out of place at times until my dinosaur knowledge saves the day and I'm a rockstar again for a while. It's fun and I wouldn't really want to do much else professionally if given the opportunity.

Lamest novelty account ever.

Building something simple from scratch is pointless and inefficient.

With that logic the browser should never have been built. Frameworks would also not have been built. You are free to program as you wish but don't call people idiots for not liking frameworks and giving valid reasons for it.

And before you get all- but, but browsers are not simple- the first one was.

And therein is the problem. Frameworks led to making programming a simple routine of mediocrity. No one is truly innovating in software and programming any more. The browser has become legacy and needs to be retired. JS should never have become a first class language. These things are holding us back now and yet people still believe they are the future. Native mobile apps have to fill in the gaps where web applications fail because the browser and security sandbox restrict our capabilities, but native apps are just as much a problem to innovation. We need something new and powerful that breaks through the limitations of the browser while providing a safe and secure application delivery platform. And before you say "Web Assembly"- NO! Just NO! We don't need another disjointed layer of crap on top of the browser to make up for its shortcomings. We need something new and frameworks aren't going to get us there.

Good points all. It won't convince any programmers who are balls-deep in the framework fantasy though. Since most of these coders were introduced to frameworks at the beginning of their careers, the likelihood of them accepting that there are other ways is quite small since they have formed their opinions on frameworks based on that start (and some rockstar programmer they idolize). One thing I've learned over my decades of programming all manner of systems is that the script kiddies are numerous and willfully ignorant to change. The browser as an application platform with HTML, CSS and JS sticking around for as long as it has shows this. We could have built a better application delivery platform by now if there weren't so many green programmers against it. They champion Open Source and denigrate proprietary software but it is obvious we're not really improving and innovating with FOSS like we were under closed source. There no longer is incentive to mature technologies because everything has become a popularity contest now. New frameworks are released all the time which just meet someone else's edge case or niche use or worse yet, are some gap-fill to the inadequacy of another framework. We could have fixed all this but the browser brand wars and fanboys were too numerous to see the real problems. We could have a true application delivery platform that would free up the browser to be about content and also eliminate the installed app ecosystem that is making all platforms a mess. We ended up here because of the script kiddies wanting to continue on with the jQuery, Angular, Bootstrap, etc. game where everything is sad and similar instead of making something new and bad ass. I've grown tired of web applications that are nothing more than social, video, maps, messaging and micro-transaction mashups. They have run their course and are no longer interesting to anyone outside of narcissistic attention whores. Let's get back to building cool things with new technologies that aren't refried frameworks and platforms. Let's make programming great again.

I've spent three decades programming and did not stay in the management realm long because I wanted to keep doing real work. In those three decades I have seen many changes in the technologies, tools, techniques and trends. Over half my knowledge is now considered a relic of the past. The fundamental knowledge of logic, project management, efficient coding techniques and knowing to avoid bugs by choosing better paths still holds though my specific knowledge changes all the time. My knowledge and experience has high worth today because I stay adaptive and blend the old ways with the new in ways that make things better. I know I have value because I can get through to even the most arrogant young know-it-all developer once they realize I am not a dinosaur and they can actually learn something from me. That's a great thing but the sad truth is the industry values me less because of my age and salary requirements. I have to be cautious of working for startups and companies who think ten mediocre H1B visa hires can do what two seasoned veterans can do in the same time and budget. If a company lists a bunch of technologies that are less than a year old or more than three frameworks I will steer clear of them because they are going to be rewriting their code base constantly and introducing new bugs as often as new features. I prefer to stick with companies who have an investment in their code base and are moving to evolve it with well thought out plans instead of following hot trends. It may hurt me career-wise at times to do this but I'm not going to change my ways. If anybody should be worried about their skills losing value then it is the programmers who change their tools and technologies constantly. They do it so quickly and often that they gain no significant depth in their knowledge. I wonder how they will cope twenty years down the road when a new set of coders comes in with ideas they think are crazy and not well engineered. I'll hopefully be out by then so I won't have to see it first hand.

SVN is a good compromise. It may be dated but it does the job well. I have trusted it for years to be a solid personal use SCM but have also used it in my job when we needed an unobtrusive yet substantial version manager. I think that SCM should be a simple tool that does not take massive amounts time and management. SVN fits that is nicely.

I have only programmed in half of these languages but they were easy enough to sort out if you know some basic info on them such as white space significance in Python and how what functional language syntax looks like. A few were dead simple because they gave away the answer in the code by necessity. Got 20/20 but that's only because I have spent nearly three decades in lots of languages and you learn a lot of things about all languages even if you haven't used them. Fun quiz but don't take it serious.

Whitespace

Well that's discouraging to hear. I haven't had a chance to dive into it yet so to find out it bears little resemblance to the Delphi of old makes me think it's not going to be worth working with. I guess it suffers from the same thing that most development tools do today: web mentality. The findViewById sounds too much like getElementById from JavaScript and makes me think the use will be just as horrific. Oh well, I guess all good things must come to an end at some point. I miss the 90s more now.

Thanks for letting me know. I must have missed the source on this one.

Taken from Google/Stack Exchange:

SQL, for example, is declarative but is also a proper programming language because it is T-C.) Of course, the same isn't true of a markup language like HTML or CSS. In fact, there are whole classes of problem that these languages simply can't solve.Dec 19, 2010

Note: T-C = Turing Complete = In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules (such as a computer's instruction set, a programming language, or a cellular automaton) is said to be Turing complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any single-taped Turing machine.

Any programming language survey that includes HTML and CSS on it cannot be taken seriously. Ever.

Okay, so countries other than the USA have some technical programming chops, but it's not good enough when you think about what this means overall. Their technical skills might be superior but unless they apply them somewhere other than malware and security attacks then they really don't have anything useful. What I mean is if there are such talented programmers around the world then where are the innovative uses of their skills? Where are the advanced operating systems, superior data storage technologies or even just a mildly killer web site/app? As usual in technology it's not the technical skills that mean the most it's how they are applied and what you accomplish with them. Maybe American coders aren't up to snuff on algorithms as much as China or Russia but what are those countries actually doing with their skills besides getting H1B visas to come to the USA and work for American countries? Results matter more than simply being good at something on paper.

The computing world already played that joke out to it's fullest beginning in 1951 with the founding of Wang Laboratories. And as with everything else in the world, Simpsons did it.

Cool find. I worked with Borland Delphi for a while in the mid 90s when there wasn't much choice in visual development tools. I was mostly writing in Visual Basic 3.0 at the time but a friend turned me on to Delphi and it was amazing how much more advanced it was in comparison. It was certainly leaps and bounds ahead of Power Builder which many of my colleagues wrongly believed was the future of desktop development. Anyway, I left off at Delphi 7 and never looked it up again to see if it still existed until I had a recent bout of nostalgia and found out Embarcadero acquired it. The current incarnation looked interesting but too expensive to just play with so this free starter will allow me to take it for a test drive and see how it stacks up to Visual Studio development. Not sure I'll do anything remotely serious with it but it's nice to have an option built on a classic language.

ITT: @roznak has lots to say about Agile and SCRUM.

I'm with you man. Of all the bad methodologies I've worked with through the years, this shit is the worst.

I've learned to leave comments that explain what my line of thought was when I wrote the code in the first place. When you revisit your code after a months/years and see something weird or unusual and the comments don't give you a clue as to what you were thinking at the time, then it takes a while to figure things out and you might simply discount the code as crack smoking craziness. I will even indicate that I was in a rush or under high stress if I write something that might be confusing later so I will know it was not a conscious decision to hack something instead of taking time to work it out. Good comments don't pay off in the short term but they can certainly pay off in shovelfuls when you go to fix a bug.

Fuck everything about this article. It's no wonder why programming has turned into the mess it has when it is believed that these things are where the future is. Framework this, pre-processor that, algorithm all over- we've lost sight of how to build anything properly anymore. Just look at all these popular pieces and parts and ask yourself where they will be in 2 to 5 years and that will tell you how insignificant to software engineering they are. I've spent my career honing my skills and growing my knowledge to be a capable software engineer and architect only to have the most recent 5 years completely turn that into chaos. As soon as I use my new "Just-in-time education" about a new hot technology it becomes passé because some new hot thing has just popped up and the technology I was working on integrating is no longer being contributed to. I was far more productive and project successful when I simply built my own libraries and techniques and grew them over time to be what my projects needed. I've grown tired of all the promises that HTML5 + JS + framework du jour + back-end technology stack are supposed to give us but never deliver. HTML5 was supposed to finish off Flash because it could do sooooo much yet we have few examples of anything remotely as good. All the hype these days is to draw money to a select few popular people while the rest of us are supposed to worship them and struggle to manage the cluster fuck they give us as technology. If I didn't have so many years vested in this career I'd just change professions and be done with it all. What a crappy time it is to be a seasoned programmer. Young guys, I don't envy your futures. /rant

Yes. Everyone is going to abandon the Internet because you keep asking the same damn questions every damn day. You killed the Internet. I hope you're happy.

Windows Services are not too difficult to write and maintain, but they can be a bit cumbersome to debug and troubleshoot. I like services for tasks like what you describe because they can be made very robust and resilient. The architecture of the service will greatly depend on what exactly you need this code to do. If it is simply connecting to the SQL database and running queries/stored procedures, then great you can write a simple service with a simple monitoring and control application for it. If you need access to network resources, to interact with the UI or to use more than one security context then it gets messy, but it doesn't sound like you need to do this. If you're a Visual Studio user you can make a single solution that has your service project, the service deployment project and your monitoring/control project together in a nice tidy package. There's even a handy dandy command line tool to register/unregister your service for painless testing and deployment. It's pretty easy once you understand how a service works in its various operational phases. Just be sure to write in some fail safe checks to make sure the SQL server is accessible and to wait for it if it's not. I would also out in some logging feature to give you feedback on how things are going when you're not watching the control/monitoring app. Keep everything as simple as you can with appropriate error handling and don't lose sight of the fact that a service is simply a timer driven app. There's plenty of resources for writing Windows Services in C# or VB.Net and it's a lot less daunting than people think.

I'm glad someone else gets this. It amazes me how so many programmers believe JavaScript is a path to a grand future filled with rainbows and unicorns handing out free beer and money. JavaScript is a clunky and weak language that has been made from leftover ideas borrowed from other languages and glued together with endless frameworks. It's garbage. Now that I've said that, the JS defenders will be pouring in now to tell me how I'm wrong and why JavaScript is the future. Yeah, whatevs. I've been programming for nearly three decades now and I have worked with the good, the bad and the ugly of many programming languages. I feel sometimes like we're regressing in software engineering because we are enabling this backwards language and it's half-witted companion we call the browser. I had such high hopes for a real web programming language and platform to come around. The Rich Internet Application push of last decade looked like a positive start to that, but out of nowhere we abandoned the idea of using the browser as a launch point for real code to going back to cobbled together HTML/CSS/JS nonsense. And yes, I do know Web Assembly is coming. It'll be here any day now I'm sure. Really. It's time for a revolution in software engineering. It's clear that the future is bleak if we keep betting on JavaScript and the broken web. There will come a day when a lot of programmers realize this and panic sets in. Hopefully we can fix things before that time, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Hmm, I don't think I can put it down to a guideline. It's sort of an intuitive feel I get from them during an interview or working with them the first time. Some people just have the programmer mentality and it exudes from them. Others just come off as wet fish. I guess if I had to make it into something concrete then I would say it's how comfortable they feel/act when you ask them to back up their reasoning or motivation for doing something. I'd also add in there the willingness to go learn about something on their own to solve a problem before just simply asking for help. The good diamonds in the rough often tell you all about what they learned and tried along the way to solving a problem and then ask for guidance once they get stuck. I like those types since they show initiative and the ability/willingness to learn. They also aren't easily intimidated and accept challenges even when they might be getting in over their heads. Of course there are some who just take every challenge and drown, but I usually know them ahead of time and are standing by with the life jacket and some words of wisdom when the time comes.

As for the trying to account for user errors and odd cases, I changed my style of teaching to make these things less of an issue. I try to get them to think more simply about a problem and make it so they can't possibly have a situation that causes a user to make an improper choice/action. I used to be a defense type programmer with lots of error handling until I was shown that most errors can be avoided by simply reducing the complexity of the code/feature so it can't error in the first place (except for things like hardware failures of course). It's another one of those things I can't simply put into words here, but I do spend a lot of time teaching these things to my more experienced students. It makes me proud when they show me how they avoided a pitfall just by changing how the users/interfaces/systems interact with it.

My company does hire many junior programmers. They have always looked to hire the inexperienced and mold them to suit. I was the first senior hire they brought on board. I work with a wide range of programmers with varying levels of skills, but this has been my experience all throughout my career. Once I became a senior, I began a long journey of training and mentoring juniors and non-programmers alike to code and do it well. My experience with mentoring the junior programmers has generally been great. There are maybe just a handful out of dozens I've mentored that just didn't work out. I think they were not really programmers at heart and just wanted to do what they thought would be cool or career advancing but didn't want to put in the effort to learn. I've become quite adept at identifying the diamond in the rough programmers from those who will just get by. It's fun to mentor and it keeps me sharp as well since I have to stay ahead of them to maintain the guru status. I enjoy being a mentor mostly because I was lucky enough to have had some great mentors myself. Because of that I feel it is my duty to keep the tradition alive and to help juniors become seniors.

$199 for Operator Basic (10 styles) on one computer. Yeah, I don't think they understand programmers very well.

So we'll just go make our own source code repository website, with blacjack and hookers. Neah, forget the source repo stuff.

Compiled language == coding. Interpreted language == scripting. C# is a compiled language. HTML is a markup language that uses a parser so I would consider it a third animal more akin to "writing".