what are we even doing here man
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Specifically, this one.
The Usborne guide to Better BASIC: a beginners guide to writing programs (1983)@foone I had this one.
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@foone@digipres.club i will take this opportunity to once again tell tale of the time i worked on an embedded device with a firmware written in C, roughly a 150,000-line codebase on a little STM32 chip
the original author of the code base did not, in fact, seem to understand what an array was.
the device communicated to another device bolted to the same machine, using MODBUS. with potentially up to 10,000 MODBUS registers storing data, but realistically only a few actually in use.
the file defining the structure where the data was stored for the registers simply made a struct, with elements starting at "reg0" and incrementing up to "reg10000". the implementation file was just as bad.
this is why the codebase was roughly 150,000 lines. it should have been perhaps 5000.
the code used a small function that did pointer math in order to actually access the register, usually, unless it was referenced directly in code, or sometimes used a macro instead.
none of this was even the worst offense within the codebase. -
what are we even doing here man
@foone im not a developer, but I can say in good conscience that I do :)
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Usborne released a bunch of their old 80s programming books for free a while back, and they're all just a gem:
@foone I've posted this page from Usborne's guide to jargon before and commented that I'd be happy if all programmers were as computer literate as grade school students in the 80s.
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if someone doesn't have experience with arrays, then they don't have enough experience with programming to hire them to program for you. they are still on page 9 of the programming book
@foone Hey, functional programmers need jobs, too!
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what are we even doing here man
Well, ok, that's a silly requirement. But do you have experience in Loops (flow control)?
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@foone I've posted this page from Usborne's guide to jargon before and commented that I'd be happy if all programmers were as computer literate as grade school students in the 80s.
@th god that'd be nice
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See? Page 9. Arrays.
@foone What's weird is that I distincly remember page 9 (its illustrations, mostly), but I don't remember the book cover. I grew up in 80s West Germany, so maybe they were used in a different (or translated) book. Definitely a nostalgia hit :)
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@foone What's weird is that I distincly remember page 9 (its illustrations, mostly), but I don't remember the book cover. I grew up in 80s West Germany, so maybe they were used in a different (or translated) book. Definitely a nostalgia hit :)
@klausman yeah, different publishers often use different covers, so I imagine the west german publisher just made their own cover
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Usborne released a bunch of their old 80s programming books for free a while back, and they're all just a gem:
@foone For non-us users: the site is guessing your country and redirects to 404 page, if guess != "us" 🙄 But it's not geo fencing. You need to pick en-us at the home page and then request the above URL again. 😬
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what are we even doing here man
@foone hey I know arrays! I can do big ones, small ones, multidimensional ones. I also know variables and indentation!!! Hire me!!!!!!!!
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@foone@digipres.club i will take this opportunity to once again tell tale of the time i worked on an embedded device with a firmware written in C, roughly a 150,000-line codebase on a little STM32 chip
the original author of the code base did not, in fact, seem to understand what an array was.
the device communicated to another device bolted to the same machine, using MODBUS. with potentially up to 10,000 MODBUS registers storing data, but realistically only a few actually in use.
the file defining the structure where the data was stored for the registers simply made a struct, with elements starting at "reg0" and incrementing up to "reg10000". the implementation file was just as bad.
this is why the codebase was roughly 150,000 lines. it should have been perhaps 5000.
the code used a small function that did pointer math in order to actually access the register, usually, unless it was referenced directly in code, or sometimes used a macro instead.
none of this was even the worst offense within the codebase. -
what are we even doing here man
@foone yeah, that's it - arrays - that's all I have experience with, give me a dict and I'm going to be stumped.
No records for me, only a long list of items lol
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if someone doesn't have experience with arrays, then they don't have enough experience with programming to hire them to program for you. they are still on page 9 of the programming book
@foone was confused for a minute till I saw the full thread... lol
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if someone doesn't have experience with arrays, then they don't have enough experience with programming to hire them to program for you. they are still on page 9 of the programming book
@foone Easy for you to say. I've been making do with red-black trees all this time.
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@petealexharris @linear @foone Or had one of those insane managers who misread something somewhere once where some problem was caused by someone misuing an array, so they banned all array use in the whole company.
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what are we even doing here man
@foone but do you know Keyboard (input device)?
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@revk @foone That is one of my memories from programming as a child. I was ~10 years old. I saw the starry night screensaver in Norton Commander and wanted a similar effect in QBasic.
Lots of copy and paste later I had like 15 pairs of x,y coordinate variables (x1,y1,x2,y2,.…), a cycle counter that goes from 1 to 15, and a shitload of if then clauses: delete star at x1,y1, assign new coordinates, paint star, wait, delete star at x2, y2, etc. pp.
It was awesome, but was hard to add more stars. -
See? Page 9. Arrays.
@foone I’m pretty sure I had that book
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Usborne released a bunch of their old 80s programming books for free a while back, and they're all just a gem:
@foone I get redirected to the German site with no option to switch pack (the 404 references a non-existent dropdown menu…)
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