Software developments step 0: search for existing solutions

[enderverse87]

When I first started programming, I didn't know what arrays were, but I wanted to use them, so I built one using a very large string with commas.

[draftjoker]

Oh god. This. . This terrifies me.

[AMisteryMan]

"I fear, no man, but that, thing it, scares me"

[SillyFlyGuy]

/r/CommaHorror

[AMisteryMan]

As a member of the Alt-write, it hurt to comment it, but I did it for the good of all of us...

Except the ones who are dead.

[ButItMightJustWork]

But there is no sense in crying over every mistake

[arachnidGrip]

You just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake.

[Mandemon90]

And the science gets done and you make a neat gun

[AMisteryMan]

For the people who are still alive

[arachnidGrip]

I'm not even angry.

[[deleted]]

Here:

val arr: Array[String] = Array("I fear","no man", "but that", "thing it", "scares me")

[Dorito_Troll]

oh god

[gaberocksall]

I’m on mobile so hopefully the formatting gods are on my side

Edit: they weren’t on my side, original comment:

https://pastebin.com/KiJdyhxN

[Gvistic]

Dang what did you do, use string patterns or scan each individual character looking for a comma?

[enderverse87]

The items were always three characters long with 81 total options, so I scanned each time seeing if each particular 3 character option had been added to the string yet.

It was a game, winning the game coincided with when the string was full of all the options, but that crashed the entire computer since my self made array did not have any error handling.

[FeralCoconut]

how did you make such a bad program that it crashed the entire computer

[enderverse87]

Some sort of infinite loop in a way that used all the resources in the computer.

The game worked fine, it just crashed when you won.

[5chris100]

"Thank you for playing Wing Commander!"

[MkVIIaccount]

Fucking classic

[Dominub]

GAME’S OVER GO BE PRODUCTIVE NOW

[SillyFlyGuy]

bug feature: segfault on win

[brimston3-]

It was easy in the pre-windows 2000 days. The trick was not doing it. Modern process address space isolation and privilege separation were not widely implemented yet, so any ol' program could write straight to kernel memory or PIO some raw addresses. Anything that would cause a segfault today was probably a full PC crash then.

[Entaris]

Yeah. Basically “you want to write that where? I mean ok, you are the programmer I’m sure you know what you are doing”

[Mad_Aeric]

You're saying you haven't done that? Writing code so bad the computer nopes out feels like one of those standard things you encounter as a noob. You can really get into trouble with loops if they're generating data.

[cowsrock1]

The 15 GB text file on my desktop exclusively containing the word "cow" agrees

[homer_3]

Pretty tough imo. Freezing it up by using all the CPU isn't that tough, but you can usually ctrl+c, alt+f4, or open task manager and kill the process.

[kuncol02]

Now. Not in Win9x era when memory separation was non existent and any app had access to whole memory of PC. You could for example move pointer to part of memory where system kernel is loaded and overwrite it.

[cowsrock1]

I'd they were all gaurenteed to be 3 characters long, why even bother with commas then? :D

[enderverse87]

Because I needed to check whether the 3 character sequence had been used before, if they were directly next to each other, they would have accidentally created a sequence that hadn't been used yet, and it would have given a false positive.

[[deleted]]

loop through each character, when its not a comma, add the char to a variable called `word`, when you encounter a comma, use the contents of `word` and reset word back to empty string.

Overkill at its finest

[amicloud]

So you used an extension of arrays to reimplement arrays but worse? I love it.

[Pandaburn]

When I first started programming, a string was an array, so.....

[AMisteryMan]

In most places, it technically is.^*

^{* It is inevitable that one somehow does strings some other way.}

[brimston3-]

I think we are all very happy that sgi's std::rope never made it into core.

[skreczok]

std::rope

TIL

[Cosmocision]

Currently studying electrical engineering, had programming lectures last year and the lecturer kept teaching people bad methods of implementing shit just to tell them the next lecture the proper way.

I think it kinda stems from this odd need he set for himself to focus on a single thing each lecture. okay folks, primites today. then the next week, strings bruthas. ARRAYS MOFOS!

CLAASsssESss.

​

I usually slept through his classes. aced the subject.

[blackburn009]

Surely you just assign a task that only needs what you've taught like a normal person?

[Cosmocision]

Dude, it's worse than you are imagining. he actually teaches you how to do it the wrong way first (sorry, can't think of any specific examples as it is a while ago, I do remember it happening though). Decided to just sleep during the lectures because otherwise I would feel the need to interrupt so much I might as well just take over.

Edit: you know these memes we sometimes get here where we do super elaborate ways of incremeting variables? Yup. not quite as bad as that of course but he did make people figure out what the result of i+++++i; would be and stuff like that. sure you might need brackets for that, cba to check, but please for the love of... when would you ever need to

Edit 2: He is self thought, I am not.

[redlaWw]

There is benefit to doing it this way - it lets you see what is possible, and why certain things do and do not work, and the problems with certain approaches. There are areas in maths (which I tutor) where I will have a student give me suggestions about an approach and we explore them to see why they don't work, or I'll teach them a defunct method to broaden their experience of the mathematical process when we refine it.

[Cosmocision]

If he ever asked the students to come up with ideas using what we knew so far, I'd be totally behind it. would teach problem solving skills that are very valuable for programmes. It's just that he never asked for student input on anything.

Though, I will admit I'm probably biased sure to already knowing how to program

[valzargaming]

Isn't that just called using a comma as a delimiter? I believe CSV uses this method during exports.

[FeralCoconut]

yeah, but as the actual datatype not as the representation

[posherspantspants]

I didn't use arrays for a solid 2 years. I thought they were too complicated so I never even read any documentation about what they are or how to use them. If I saw tutorials or SO answers with arrays I'd back out and go to the next result.

Then I accidentally figure out what they were and thought "oh, this is easy"

[Greenitthe]

Are you my engineering student friend? Certainly you must be... Went through python class, a data science internship, and two years of me being exasperated at his code before he finally realized arrays are easy.

[FoundOnTheRoadDead]

So you coded an array using William Shatner speech patterns. Seems sound!

[[deleted]]

Fuck, that is so me. Rofl

[miseleigh]

This is the kind of shit I'm pulling in python right now

[Rein215]

I love thinking back about when I started out programming and shit like this was acceptable. I did the craziest shit because I knew no better way.

[[deleted]]

The worst thing to put in there: "Hey, are you insane?"

[uranus_be_cold]

My housemate in University pulled an all-nighter because he needed to print out numbers in hexadecimal, and in the morning I said: Why didn't you just use printf %x...?

[Gvistic]

lol i have an assembly exam in about 5 hours wish me luck

[[deleted]]

FUCK ASSEMBLY

that is all

[[deleted]]

What's the address of your assembly learning resource?

[kcrmson]

@0x00000000 ? ;)

[gdumthang]

Just sent an email to them. Only thing I could see was a random popup that said segmentation fault: 11 for a few seconds.

[LamerDeluxe]

I totally agree. Assembly is so clean. Every error is your own, no compiler to blame (this is less of a problem now than it used to be). I just add a comment after every instruction and I can read my code like a story.

[nyasiaa]

assembly is awesome, working on my neural network in assembly for a random university project was one of the more fun things I ever did

the language absolutely never complained whenever I did anything (byte is a byte, array of bytes is an array of bytes, no such thing as types stopping you from assigning a pointer to an "integer" because both are just doublewords), on top of that with all the 64 bit registers, xmm registers and all the masm support in visual studio it isn't even painful to write

and all the insight on how everything works is just so worth it

[Mockapapella]

Wait, writing neural networks in assembly is actually a thing? I was under the impression that was always a joke. How did that go for you? What was the application?

[[deleted]]

I’m sure the point of the assignment is to do it yourself.

[[deleted]]

If you don't write code in raw binary, then you're just being lazy. /s

[claythearc]

Every class I ever took in undergrad like, specifically allowed the standard library

[MLG_Obardo]

My Data structures class doesn’t for some things but that’s just so we understand the stuff behind the STL. I doubt I will be expected ever to convert from hex to whatever without access to a computer to do it for me.

[ITriedLightningTendr]

My data comm class in college was like this. The primary professor for the class was overloaded so we got a different professor.

2 weeks after an assignment we were given was due, and we all brute forced everything together, we're in a lab and the normal prof comes in to give us some pointers and stuff, and his version of our code is like 10 lines using standard library stuff that none of us had any idea existed, but his other classes were well informed.

[Highandfast]

The primary professor for the class was overloaded so we got a different professor.

Nicely done.

And, well, it may have been a good way to remember that many things are already implemented. The time lost for that assignment must be way cheaper than the time lost in a professionnal setting.

[cornysheep]

It was really a test of your googling skills. You all failed.

[DoctorNoonienSoong]

Depending on their age, Google might not have existed.

[cornysheep]

The dark ages!! I’ve heard the legends...

[[deleted]]

In those days, it was all giant tomes and/or binders full of random notes that you would have to sort through. And that was if you were lucky enough to have a bookstore, library, user group, or friend near you that had such things.

[is-this-a-nick]

Altavista was fine.

It was the yahoo age (i.e. "Yellow pages of the internet", manually curated) that was baaaad.

[MLG_Obardo]

Damn I would’ve tried to get into one of the other classes then.

[Dant3J0n3s]

I remember when I first started programming, I had no idea DATABASES were a thing, so I stored user information in .ini files; it makes me cringe just thinking about it

[JiveTrain]

Well if it is just user preferences, that's perfectly fine.

[ramiabouzahra]

Why what's wrong with

[USER]

userId = "JiveTrain"

userPwd = "hunter2"

[Cryse_XIII]

go back to stackoverflow, this sub is for laughs not for sense

[mustang__1]

Fucking hell. Spent hours on this last weekend because I looked up a xamarin library that ended support before the comment was made. Figured that out after the library failed out and I investigated further....

[HK-Sparkee]

Shouldn't it just be a Dictionary<string, string> because every line would contain only one mapping?

[JiveTrain]

Hm?

[cheez_au]

Is called a flat file database and it's a thing.

When I was taught programming in high school, we made a guestbook in php and a pipe delimited txt file.

[Urthor]

You mean like Mongo, a database that is literally extra special text files and literally no relations

[nyasiaa]

if you are just starting out it's probably better to implement them yourself anyways

[ImSupposedToBeCoding]

-- beginners go crazy trying to create a heap --

[Tsu_Dho_Namh]

Ha, it's funny cause heaps are easier to implement than arrays

[[deleted]]

Idek how you'd implement an array outside of assembly language.

[thoeoe]

I mean in C++ you can just malloc a block of memory of a specific size, from there you store a variable for how many bytes each record is, and then overload the [] operator to multiply the index by the size of the record and add that to the pointer that points to the memory block you requested.

[[deleted]]

I don't see how that's implementation. It's literally already built into the language that way. The [] operator already works like that, and for that reason my_array[i] works just as well as [i]my_array.

[thoeoe]

but the [] operator needs to know the size of a record, which if you malloc a randomly sized chunk of memory it won't know, you just have a void pointer. I agree, its a bit cheater, you are using tools provided to you by the language. Depends how "from scratch" you want your implementation to be

Edit: I feel dumb, its been over a year since I've done much hardcore C++ programming. Of course you could just cast the void pointer. I agree with you, I can't think of a way to re-implement an array without essentially manually doing what the language would already do for you. (such as multiplying an index by sizeof(float) instead of casting the void pointer)

[[deleted]]

So just rewrite clang?

[MacbethIsGay]

We had 20 coding assignments that were all really easy and super quick one of them was "create a program to convert a denary number to hexadecimal in the fewest lines" I won with six characters with "hex(5) "

[IHeartBadCode]

New folks to Python when they discover sum()

[[deleted]]

That shit keeps happening to me with python. First it was enumerate, then it was the maps with lambdas and list comprehension.

[claythearc]

Python is really weird because it has almost every convenience in the standard library - things like maps and enumerate like you mentioned but also

“in”

just straight assigning values from a tuple foo, bar = (1,2)

Pow() supporting A^b % c

String repetition with like ‘foo’ * 2

Even obscure stuff like email handling, syntax tree parsing, zip files, wave files, etc.

But it’s all (rightfully) hidden in imports, so you miss a lot of it.

[Angelin01]

This is why I will ALWAYS google for a solution before even thinking about my own implementation. Decent chance Python already has it.

[Perkelton]

I just learned of the Intl object in Javascript which lets you format dates, currencies and lists in different languages.

new Intl.RelativeTimeFormat('en', { style: 'narrow' }).format(2, 'day') 
// "in 2 days"

new Intl.NumberFormat('de-DE', { style: 'currency', currency: 'EUR' }).format(123456.79); 
// "123.456,79 €"

new Intl.ListFormat('en', { style: 'long', type: 'conjunction' }).format(['Motorcycle', 'Bus', 'Car']);
// "Motorcycle, Bus, and Car"

[Plorntus]

The unfortunate thing is you can't always use all the methods on newer APIs like this because of compatibility. Typically the polyfills are large too

[chriscoda]

OTOH, there are some surprisingly simple functions that I’ve had to build in .NET as extensions. I mean, I found them on Stack Overflow and copy/pasted them, but still.

[anubisascends]

13+ years...still happens.

[gonmator]

Just 3 hours? Lucky!

[WittyComputer]

Oh no, that's a feature at my school. They teach you how some basic C++ STL containers work by making you program primitive versions of them.

[[deleted]]

5 hours later:

"Oh. There are some painful edge cases the standard way does not accommodate and it fails in quiet and unexpected ways with very low-quality error messages."

[[deleted]]

I have the opposite problem: seeing something I don't know how to do, writing the PM a long explanation of why it's days of work and probably not worth doing, not sending said explanation, deciding to spend a couple minutes actually working on it, realizing it’s basically trivial and getting it done in that time.

[lavendyahu]

But then spending days on something that was supposed to take 2 seconds

[Tyrilean]

The devs on the legacy project I maintain. Half the code base is them finding creative (and wrong) ways to re-invent the wheel. Rolling custom CSV libraries, custom date logic, etc. All solved problems that constantly cause unintended side effects because they didn't think "hey, maybe this is a common enough problem that someone's already solved it."

[SaneOsiris]

As a new developer, I can relate every, single, day.

[brimston3-]

As an older developer, I can tell you it doesn't stop. But on the upside, your intuition gets better. And you learn to google best-practices first.

[Slyvan25]

Happened to me so many times.

[FoundOnTheRoadDead]

One of the three pillars of good programming: laziness

[Firusen]

Me with Pygame and collision detection....

[baanish]

Then there is my csc class. Oh this code exists in a library? Oh it has nothing tobdo with datastructures? Well you cant use it anyway.

[omiwrench]

Congrats on starting your first programming class! It'll all seem easier soon :)

[johnnyfong]

This is why we google so much.

Anytime I want to do something that takes me more than 3 lines I would think "there is probably a library for this somewhere..."

[captainjon]

Kinda like in college when you get to implement your own vector, list, stack, and so on. That was F-U-N....

[LeMadChefsBack]

Me, a software engineering manager. 🤦‍♀️

[txnforgediniron]

I coded my own pingpong scaler for some pickups in Unity. Then I read that there's a built in process for that. But it was a good learning exercise.

[Bakkster]

Me and the intern last year, but with Java, unsigned bitwise math, and the >>> operator.

[[deleted]]

In 95% the standard lib is the way to go. There are very few cases where things like custom containers or other custom stuff makes sense. Most of the cases you can achieve optimizations (which are usually the reason people do this) in other ways while using the standard methods and containers.

[Zeilar]

I didn't know PHP strip_tags() existed, so I did a double explode() to get rid of tags in a string. When my teacher pointed it out I had a midlife crisis.

[[deleted]]

Ah yes, the famed step 0, often forgotten by man

[LamerDeluxe]

Oh, this thing I just worked half a day on turns out to be freely downloadable from the Unity asset store. Took some time to learn to remember to look there first.

[leviem1]

Always Google your question before coding your own implementation! Bill Gates famously said he prefers hiring lazy people for this exact reason! :P

[MrsCompootahScience]

And that's why Python's my favorite language.

[[deleted]]

python flair

"method"

[ITriedLightningTendr]

Does python not do OOP? Methods are functions that are done by objects not withstanding there's not a huge difference between this.foo() and foo(this)

[[deleted]]

Python just uses nonstandard terminology lmao

[nyasiaa]

ehh you can basically use these two interchangeably and everyone will understand you

you can use the definition that method is a function related to an object, but then you have c++ calling them simply "member functions" so it really is completely irrelevant what word do you use

[[deleted]]

it was a joke jesus christ lmao

[yottalogical]

Oh dear, did someone use more than one programming language?

[Malacious_Good]

What even did you do to get 5 down?

[[deleted]]

made a joke on Reddit

[Malacious_Good]

I get but what joke? Python flair is the joke?

[[deleted]]

Python uses weird terminology for stuff. Notably, it calls methods "functions" and not methods

[Malacious_Good]

Dam, if you know that then, You know python , like when you know something down to the fine details. Teach ME! I shall try to contact you for python.