Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
(@argumate, and maybe @nuclearspaceheater and @the-grey-tribe?)
The struggle is real.
Should I read this as “I have encountered a number of programmers in the wild that are totally incompetent”, or “yeah, programming is hard”?
Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
(@argumate, and maybe @nuclearspaceheater and @the-grey-tribe?)
If you know three programming languages within a paradigm, you can pick up another in a couple of weeks. You can write something simple after a day, but learning the API takes a bit more time.
If you know programming languages within three different paradigms, you can learn a language in another paradigm as quickly.
If you only do high-level stuff, moving to a lower level closer to hardware is harder than the other way round.
Moving to another paradigm within one programming language, say from MVC to a continuation-passing web framework or from a game library like SDL to an entity-component framework or from PostgreSQL to Redis, or from gradient descent to bayesian filtering, can also take some time.
If you know a couple of concepts and paradigms, you start working on day one, but you will only be really productive after a coupe of weeks.
That said: If you have trouble understanding a concept like distributed version control or object-oriented programming or shader pipelines, it is orders of magnitude easier to ask an expert to help, tell the expert what you think you understand, and let the expert tell you where your understanding needs to be updated. Experts can tell you where you’re wrong. If you learn a new paradigm, you can get stuck on a fundamental misunderstanding for some time.
Specific instruction from experts is great for that reason, even if you can pick stuff up on your own.
While what I’ve gone through so far mostly matches up with this (it took me about 10-20 manhours to feel like I was really starting to ‘get’ javascript in terms of general program structure and thus feel less tongue-tied, for instance), the real purpose of my question was to assess employment prospects according to the distribution of competence in the field.
Programmers of rattumb, how much truth is there to the rumor that many programmers can’t program, or that they cannot cross programming languages without specific instruction, or pick up new language concepts on their own?
(@argumate, and maybe @nuclearspaceheater and @the-grey-tribe?)
a good test of the “women are not programmers because they prefer people jobs” hypothesis would be to teach, like, a year-long programming class for girls with a lot of pair programming and the entire class collaborating on a final project the way they’ll collaborate on projects in the work world
and see if the graduates are more likely to go into tech
I haven’t done pair programming but I’m really not looking forward to it.
How can pair programmers, like, think, when at any moment their thoughtstream could be interrupted?
I was reading about Ethereum.
Solidity is the JavaScript-like programming language designed for developing smart contracts that run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Compile and Run Your First Program
This guide is a short introduction to Emojicode and assumes you have a basic knowledge of object-orientated programming and familiarity with the command- line.
The basic structure
All Emojicode source files are named like file.emojic. So let’s get started by creating a file called greeter.emojic and put some content into it:
🏁 🍇
🍉
This is the minimum structure every program must have. 🏁 is a special part of the language after which comes a code block. Every code block begins with 🍇 and ends with 🍉.
When the program is run the code block after 🏁 is executed.
Greetings
As you can see our program does not do anything at the moment, so let’s add a greeting.
🏁 🍇
😀 🔤Howdy, partner!🔤
🍉
Before analyzing this new code we’ll give it a try.
Hint
You must have installed Emojicode to run the following commands. See Installing Emojicode if you haven’t already.
Open a command-line and navigate to the directory containing greeter.emojic. Then run this command.
emojicodec greeter.emojic
This asks the compiler to compile greeter.emojic. If everything goes well it should exit without a message and generate a file called greeter.emojib. This is an Emojicode Byte-Code File, which can be executed by the Emojicode Real-Time Engine. So let’s type:
emojicode greeter.emojib
Congratulations! You’ve written your first program. But how does it actually work?
It’s simple: 🔤Howdy, partner!🔤 is a string literal. Every character between two 🔤 is then part of the string.
Then we call the 😀 method on this string. And guess what, it just prints the string to the standard output. The thing to notice here is, that the method is actually called by putting its emoji before the object. It’s also noteworthy that Emojicode usually does not use parentheses around arguments to method calls.
Warming Up
Let’s call a few more methods to warm up. We’ll now write a method to convert English into Pig Latin. This is a very easy language because to get the Pig Latin word you just have to move the first letter of the English word to the end and add ay.
In Emojicode you can easily extend every existing class, so to follow good object-orientated practices we’ll extend the string class to have a method to convert an English word to Pig Latin. Add the following into the file:
🐋 🔡 🍇
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡🍇

🍉
🍉
🐋 🔡 🍇 says: Extend the class 🔡 (That’s the string class). 🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 declares a method called 🐷 and returning an instance of the 🔡 class.
Ok, let’s take the first letter of this string by using the 🔪 method, which is, according to the documentation, capable of giving us just part of a string. It’s signature is:
🐖 🔪 from 🚂 length 🚂 ➡️ 🔡
This tells us that the 🔪 method takes two arguments named from and length, both of them must be of the type 🚂. 🚂 stands for an integer, and that the method returns an instance of 🔡.
Let’s call it on the string we are currently working on.
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 🍇
🔪 🐕 0 1
🍉
This should get us a string containing the first character of the string we are currently working on which is represented by 🐕. You can compare 🐕 to this or self in other languages. However, we need to store the result somewhere.
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 🍇
🍦 firstLetter 🔪 🐕 0 1
🍉
The above code stores the result into the variable firstLetter. The variable is actually declared and initialized here. It’s important to notice that 🍦 was used here to declare the variable which prevents the variable from being changed later. This kind of variable is called “frozen variable”.
You may have also noticed that we didn’t declare a type for the variable. Emojicode supports type inference that is the compiler infers the variable’s type by looking at the type of the value for the variable.
Now we need to get the rest of the word.
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 🍇
🍦 firstLetter 🔪 🐕 0 1
🍦 rest 🔪 🐕 1 🐔 🐕
🍉
The 🐔 method returns the length of a string, so we get the whole string. You can see that the result of the 🐔 method is used as argument to 🔪.
Finally we just need to concatenate firstLetter, rest and ay and return it from the method.
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 🍇
🍦 firstLetter 🔪 🐕 0 1
🍦 rest 🔪 🐕 1 🐔 🐕
🍎 🍪 rest firstLetter 🔤ay🔤 🍪
🍉
The 🍪s are the most efficient way of concatenating strings. You can wrap any amount of strings between 🍪 and you will get them concatenated into one string. You should already know the 🍎 from above. It returns a value from the method.
Well done! Let’s update the 🏁 method to give us a few examples. The file should now look like this:
🐋 🔡 🍇
🐖 🐷 ➡️ 🔡 🍇
🍦 firstLetter 🔪 🐕 0 1
🍦 rest 🔪 🐕 1 🐔 🐕
🍎 🍪 rest firstLetter 🔤ay🔤 🍪
🍉
🍉
🏁 🍇
😀 🐷 🔤cat🔤
😀 🐷 🔤development🔤
😀 🐷 🔤computer🔤
🍉
Compile and let’s see:
emojicodec greeter.emojic
emojicode greeter.emojib
atcay
evelopmentday
omputercay
Cool! We have successfully translated English words into Pig Latin.
submitted by @wirehead-wannabe
No.
ten dollars says she’s going to twist me pointing out that ada lovelace did not actually invent the computer or programming and therefore men have actually contributed to the development of computers in some way as misogyny somehow
Wolfram is a famous douche and even he acknowledges that she made not just significant but seminal (heh) contributions to computer programming. There’s no convincing evidence that Babbage actually wrote her notes about computing the Bernoulli numbers. She was also from a family of wacky geniuses. It’s not unreasonable to call het the mother of computer programming or something like that.
Hobbes, Pascal or Leibniz may also have been the mother of computer programming, if you look at it a certain way, or Babbage or Gauss.
Contributions to computer programming != wrote the first program
The problem here is that all of rat-tumb agrees on the scope of the actual contribution of Ada Lovelace to the history of computing and to the programs to calculate Bernoulli numbers in particular (http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html). We are just arguing semantics here.
Outside of rat-tumb, some people don’t know anybody else other than Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing (from that movie with Benedict Cumberbatch). What about Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Vannevar Bush, Emil Leon Post, Alonzo Church, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann? Grace Hopper or Barbara Liskov might be better candidates for “Women who invented modern computing”.
Outside of rat-tumb, what does it even matter if she did or did not predict symbolic theorem-provers over a hundred years early? Does it matter if you don’t know what a compiler is, but have strong feelings about the subject anyway?
Is the Bernoulli numbers program a computer program? Did she write it? Did anything before it count as a computer program?
Those questions settle the debate. They’re just super hard to answer in a concrete way.
Yes. No. Probably.
You didn’t read the wolfram excerpt I linked to if you really think she didn’t write the program.
So Menabrea did not?
Nope. He wrote about the engine, but it was her notes that contained the first program. Read the Wolfram article.
Ok. Menabrea wrote something non-Bernoulli as an example program, but suggested Bernoulli numbers. Ada Lovelace published the first computer program. Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, if you set the cutoff right.
The real reason people argue about this is because various Feminists use it to attack nerds in the tech industry.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
I swear to god he has some kind of ancient Egyptian curse. There is always, always one of these whenever something happens. He stole an amulet from a tomb or some shit.
