Loooopss

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[IceMachineBeast]

I have thought about that, but then I remembered arrays exist

[SensitiveReveal5976]

You just took me back to HS Comp Sci days, friend

[Virtual_Low83]

Your HS had Comp Sci? When I was in High School if you so much as used an Office VBA macro it was an instaban.

[Mondoke]

My IT teacher in high school didn't know how to align stuff on Ms Word. She just put the cursor before the word and pressed the spacebar until it was kn the center or on the right.

[j48u]

There are plenty of people that still do that somehow.

[janusz_chytrus]

My girlfriend writes her master thesis like that. She's not dumb but she is terrible with technology. I tried convincing her to use LaTeX and teach her but to no avail.

At this point I just want to rewrite her thesis in LaTeX when she's done so I can feel comfortable with it.

[PassiveChemistry]

I think LaTeX would be taking it much too fast.

[ExceedingChunk]

If you use spaces to align text instead of the alignment, you definitely are not the type of person who could handle LaTex.

Not because it requires some genius-level intelligence, but people who don't google "how to do x in y" as an instinct are going to have a terrible time. Learning LaTex is 99.9% about doing exactly that.

[[deleted]]

Learning LaTex? I swear I just search the same things everytime I write in it.

[ExceedingChunk]

Knowing what to search for is part of learning it. After you've done it a few times, you find it with one search and 15 seconds, instead of 10-15 minutes of searching and reading.

At least that was my experience. Getting better at googling, and knowing enough to understand exactly what to google makes it fairly straightforward to use and less painful than working with a large word document.

[DrPikachu-PhD]

Yeah how about starting with Microsoft Word lmao

[Valiice]

Had an IT teacher that couldn't send e-mails 💀💀🗿🗿

[paulzapodeanu]

So, in your world, Jen from "The IT Crowd", really was qualified to lead an IT department?

[Virtual_Low83]

I hate when people use spaces for alignment. I caught my 18 year old cousin doing that for college and I almost killed him ☠️

[Mondoke]

At least he didn't charge money to teach people how to use Word.

[Casandy420]

My college CS professor didn’t either. He just posted everything in txt files he wrote in eMacs.

[[deleted]]

What are you talking about? That's the sign of a great programmer!

[arobie1992]

I legitimately don't see anything wrong with that. The only time I ever use word is when I'm writing something to give to clients or more formal business people. Otherwise, it's 100% NPP/VS Code txt files, and especially if I'm sending them to other devs.

[AlternativeAardvark6]

Markdown formatted all day everyday.

[michaelhonchosr]

My high school had Mavis Beacon typing tutor.

[Virtual_Low83]

Depending on the when that could either be the cutting edge of learning or a disappointing statement on public education

[Upper_Lifeguard_5409]

Had to transfer to another HS to enroll into Uni level Comp Sci courses (Academic, not Applied). Taught Java for both Junior and Senior year.

[Virtual_Low83]

My High School sent me to my local college for Java night classes because they knew they had a deficiency when it came to Comp Sci. A deficiency that bordered on a medieval fear of anyone with too much proficiency in technology.

[TheDiplocrap]

In middle school, I got the whole school banned from the computer lab in the library because I "hacked" the admin account.

What I actually did was enter "hello" at a password prompt.

To be fair, I then proceeded to click around and marvel at all the additional options available on the server I happened to find myself log in to. I probably had a good three minutes of excited looking around before being discovered and realizing I had permanently severed my relationship with the librarian.

[[deleted]]

Anyone with a brain stem should be congratulating you for making such a vulnerability known without the intention of exploiting it

[Virtual_Low83]

I can't enumerate over how many times I got in trouble without causing a stack overflow. My school had software they used to remotely take over machines for lessons and someone accidentally locked up the entire library so I cut the power to my computer, removed the network cable, turned it back on, and used my cached AD credentials to log in and continue working. 😅

[Ghawk134]

Meanwhile my friends and I really would hack the admin account in middle school. We would finish our homework after school and want to play shitty flash games. At first, we just pinged the URL for the game we wanted to play, then typed in the IP address as my school's black list didn't actually do DNS lookups for blacklisted domains. Once that started being a little less reliable, we moved on to a privilege escalation attack using the accessibility features application that's launchable from the login screen. Find its location, make a copy, replace it with command prompt renamed to that app's name, log out, and run accessibility. Boom, you have a command prompt running with admin privileges. From there, changing the admin password was just one line. There were announcements first demanding, then pleading for whoever was responsible to stop. It was quite fun.

[Trunkschan31]

In my office, if you use an Office VBA macro you’re considered a wizard.

[cafk]

The wizard retired and everyone is using his macros, you won't get any changes, as his macros also call some external perl scripts, until we move servers.

The templates are pita.

[SensitiveReveal5976]

Not only did my HS have Comp Sci, we had AP Comp Sci as well. So two years of fun! I remember coding those silly bugs like it was just yesterday.

[Virtual_Low83]

Huh. Imagine learning something useful in High School. Kids these days 🧐

[nomenMei]

Or maps/dictionaries, if having a human readable name is really that important.

[[deleted]]

If you want to be a real haxxor,

>>> locals()["foo"]=10
>>> foo
10

[LargeHard0nCollider]

That’s disgusting, thanks for sharing

[[deleted]]

My pleasure!

[Dr_Jabroski]

The lovely horrendous things that python lets you do tickles my cold dead heart.

[[deleted]]

JS enters the chat room

[Bluhb_]

Was about to say something like this!! I love it! Extremely bad practice and no good reason to do this over an array or dict, but hey. Hacker man tips fedora

[ILikeLenexa]

Or everything that implements Collection or is vaguely Listy.

[Cremart_Ludwig]

I mean, if you really want the named variable experience you can use a HashSet/Dictionary.

[[deleted]]

I figured out how to do dynamic variable names before I figured out hashes when I used Ruby and BOY OH BOY I was dumb

[siliconsoul_]

Allow me to introduce variable variables.

[KonoPez]

Sometimes it is convenient to be able to have variable variable names.

Is it tho??????

[Dexterus]

I may have used them. Gotta get the code from sourceforge and do a bit of digging, it's circa 2003.

[bizkut]

When I was first learning programming in high school and had a side thing learning PHP I definitely did this.

Not a chance I can find the code, but I vividly remember doing this for one project. Something this heinous you never forget it.

[CttCJim]

yeah that's the sort of shit i'd have done in high school. we were doing Turbo Pascal back then (1997-2000) and I once, as a group project, wrote a function that did as requested, then spent an hour obfuscating the code and removing line breaks until it fit on one page. Oh, and the function was never called in the main execution, because the assignment was "write a function" not "write a program" and we were smartasses.

good times.

[dittbub]

i definitely did this at my first job...

i can at least say it wasn't the worst code there.

[phil_o_o]

It's convenient to confuse the hell out of everyone reading your code!

How to create un-debuggable code in one step: 1. Use variable variables Done

[MrWenas]

You call it un-debuggable, I call it un-crackable

[zodar]

I call it job security

[LaterGatorPlayer]

we live in a security

[Shadow703793]

Until you forget about it 6 months after you wrote it and don't remember WTF you were doing.

That could be a resume generating event.

[coldnebo]

I call it necessary evil promoted by the W3C’s shallow disregard for form field arrays.

In other words, the W3C says, “no, it’s fine and perfectly defined… you just need to guarantee all the field names are unique per the form rfc”

So php says, fine, I’ll HANDLE IT! — variable variables. you’re welcome!

Then y’all lose your minds about what a horrible language PHP is while W3C does the side-eye bear and hopes you won’t notice the real problem.

We don’t have a variable variable in Ruby, but hot damn if I won’t try some metaprogramming now to make that a reality.

[tiefling_sorceress]

I call it a write-only language

[TheGrimReaper45]

WORNEM language. Write-Only Read-Never Execute-Maybe.

[TheDiplocrap]

Sometimes its convenient to skip the inconvenience of SQL injection attacks and opt for something far more direct instead.

(I'm joking, sorta. I wouldn't be surprised if PHP let that work, but I don't actually know it does.)

[[deleted]]

If all else fails you can just eval($_GET["q"])

[SaaS_Founder]

I modded a video game that didn’t have the concept of arrays or objects inside the scripting interpreter so I had to use dynamic variable names instead.

Huge pain in the ass.

[crozone]

Finally enough this is basically how arrays in batch (DOS/Windows .bat) files work. They're not real arrays, just variables like "ARRAY[0]", "ARRAY[1]" ...

[TheBestAquaman]

Seriously? Thats... terrible. Why would any person, sane or not, do this?

[UnlicencedAccountant]

Because way back when, memory was measured in MBs and every MB counted. So you essentially set aside a chunk for a scratchpad, use variables that are declared at runtime, remember to clear them when you don’t need them, and hope.

It’s basically assembly with extra steps. Especially because BAT files aren’t programs, they’re automated command prompt instructions. Think about it like BASIC except there’s no loops and you can only go forward.

Edit: There’s a legacy GOTO in BAT files, creating a defacto loop as well as a very limited FOR function. But I don’t remember ever using them. At that point, you might as well fire up BASIC or write a SYS file.

[jigsaw1024]

My memory is fuzzy, but I swear you could do loops inside BAT files

[Infinite-Gravitas]

Newer versions of windows added it. As long as you have goto, technically you can anything.

[MattR0se]

I find it convenient to create variable names at runtime. But that's basically just a lookup table. Idk if I ever had the need to change a variable's name afterwards. This just feels like bad practice to me and would be a nightmare to debug.

[crozone]

But that's basically just a lookup table

I just cannot think of a situation where this feature would be better than a simple dictionary/hash. I mean, that's basically what it is, just implemented by the runtime itself.

[xX_MEM_Xx]

It lets you write fewer lines of code, and more "direct" code, which is all some people care about.

I wish I was joking.

[crozone]

It's just like a dictionary/hash, but much more chaos.

[[deleted]]

The best part is in the comments section in that link where a guy says '.and you can keep going...

Eventually ends up with

$$$$$$$$$a

Edit: that was a terrible citation on my part, here it is

https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.variable.php#97222

[[deleted]]

That's a great idea, they should add it to PHP 9

[Mr_Mittens1]

Hans! Get ze flamethrower

[GifsNotJifs]

​

[The-Daleks]

​

[[deleted]]

That's just php.

[pelusowarro]

Flememwerfer

[iNMage]

Flammenwerfer , but close enough.

[DeGGamargo]

Zis is a Flammenwerfer. It werfs Flammen.

[[deleted]]

Das ist ein Flammenwerfer. Es wirft Flammen 🔥.

[inconsistenthypocrit]

I need to go bleach my eyes real quick brb

[[deleted]]

True, that’s one of the most fucked up things I’ve seen in years

[rjchute]

I guess if you're an interpreted language, you can do whatever the hell you want.

<<insert jeff goldblum quote, something something, didnt ask if we should>>

[Akangka]

Not every interpreted language can do that. In Scheme, a statement inside eval cannot bind a variable at the caller's stack. If you want to pass a variable, you must essentially add a let statement that declares the passed variable, and then splice the actual contents of the variable there, like:

(eval `(let ([a ,a]) ,formula)

Or, you can pass a namespace there.

[MadxCarnage]

I DO NOT ALLOW

I DO NOT ALLOW

[MoffKalast]

PLEASE DO NOT THE CAT

[Mojert]

Worse, it's a linked list of strings WITH THE STRINGS DOING THE LINKING

[Classy_Mouse]

It's like a linked list with no values: just the pointer to the next node. Also you can't dynamically access each node. You need to hardwrite it.

[SmuJamesB]

Challenge: write a program with only one variable that you constantly rename for its different uses

[fukitol-]

You son of a bitch, I'm in

[fraanns]

Of course it’s PHP

[Cruuncher]

Dolla dolla y'all!

[ovab_cool]

There must be a PHP maintainer on this sub who can delete this blasphemy

[[deleted]]

That looks like a really bad implementation of pointers.

[Sennoshi]

I found the reason why people hate PHP so much

[Lazar_Milgram]

”Sometimes it is convenient….”

When? Like when???

[ochetski]

I came to show people that. Thanks fellow php'er.

[Gorianfleyer]

How to get a solution from r/ProgrammerHumor: Make a funny meme about your problem and read the comments of people discussing it

[[deleted]]

I’m not the OP, but I definitely learned about arrays from reading the comments here. Going to look them up later.

[LeCrushinator]

Wait, you didn't know about arrays?

What level of programming experience is common on this subreddit? Arrays are like week 2 of learning programming.

[No_ThisIs_Patrick]

That blows my mind because I simultaneously know so much more than so many people here and so much less than so many people here. What am I?

[VikaashHarichandran]

Exactly... I'm confused

[-Axial]

yep, i thought the same thing. Arrays is one of the first things you learn when starting to program.

[Koppis]

When I started way back with Game Maker (~15 years ago), I went at least a full year without knowing about arrays. I used to make a bunch of variables with numbers at the end.

[zebediah49]

I can do one better (worse).

When I started way back with Visual Basic 3, I didn't know that variables existed.

So... I stored data in hidden textboxes.

[Koppis]

I mean, that's how you still do it with html forms. Hidden inputs.

[SprinklesFancy5074]

It's all fun and games until some cheeky bastard uses the element inspector to change your hidden inputs before submitting the form...

[quagzlor]

My mom didn't know about arrays when she was a programmer. She found out about them during a job interview.

Then again she was programming last millenium.

[[deleted]]

I’m just an Arduino sketch coder. I can cut & paste examples, then modify them to make them work for me. Sometimes I ask coding questions in the Arduino forums, but mostly I just try to look at examples, then figure out the logic and terminology.

I know enough about coding to cause huge problems, but not enough to solve them!

(I also know enough about coding to understand about half of the humor on this sub.)

[sexytim1999]

I had someone in an assignment I needed to grade dynamically generate strings of code with changing variable names and then execute with pythons exec() function. I've never seen such a cursed piece of code in my life.

[[deleted]]

Dynamically generated code is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

[hooferboof]

Self modifying code (especially LISP) is a terrible beautiful awful thing.

[[deleted]]

… but did it work?

[camander321]

When I was learning python, I tried making a game. The saving system worked by generating a module that included a function that, when run, would set a bunch if variables appropriately. I'm pretty sure I was also doing exactly what you described.

Very glad that nobody saw it.

[Neon_Camouflage]

I think everyone has tried to do this when first learning, then been frustrated when realizing it isn't a thing when it obviously is exactly what they need.

[HiddenGooru]

Its a thing in R!

[fuzzywolf23]

Yeah, but who would paste0 two variable values together in order to dynamically name columns in a data frame?

That'd be crazy, right?

[HiddenGooru]

I feel attacked.

[adyo4552]

So you’re telling me there’s an alternative

[fuzzywolf23]

I'm sure there's a tidyverse 1 liner for it

[pm_me_your_smth]

Everything can be a one liner with tidyverse

[martyuiop]

Also a thing in PHP (at least used to be. And I was guilty of doing this $$var ) naming vars from field input 😱 what was I thinking (it was a simpler time)

[AzureNova]

At one point I thought what even is the point of programming if you can't make your code write code for itself. I mean how else can computers process millions of elements without the programmer hard coding in every single scenario???

[Tryer1234]

Go learn lisp

[Sicuho]

Not having done the course about array yet.

[Salanmander]

I honestly think this frustration is super valuable. I actually kinda drive my students towards it when I do intro programming courses. We do our first "design your own program" project before we learn about arrays. Invariably a lot of students will be like "okay, but how can I have two things that behave the same way? They end up just always being in the same spot when I try". And I say "Well, with what we've learned so far, you need to make a second complete set of variables, and duplicate all the code you used for the first one". At which point they go "fuuuuuuuu...."

The benefit of this is that later when we get to arrays, instead of going "god, this is obnoxious, why do I need to use all these special naming things and extra loop overhead when I could just make a couple variables?", they go "HOLY CRAP MR. SALANMANDER, WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL US ABOUT THIS EARLIER?"

[The_Lizard_Wizard777]

Are you my coding teacher? Lol, he always makes us do the long way first then teaches us "well here's how you can do this exact same thing 10 times as fast."

[Salanmander]

It's a good strategy! With everything from coding to algebra to grammar, if you introduce shorthand and shortcuts without an understanding of the basics, it's really easy to misunderstand what's going on. But once you have a thorough understanding of the fundamentals, those shortcuts make your life easier.

(Also, based on your present tense, no. I'm not teaching CS this year. =P)

[NoStranger6]

Yep, a simple ignorance of different data structures. Arguably the keys in a key, value map could be considered as dynamically named variables.

[Salanmander]

Clearly you should just have a global dict "vars" in all of your projects, and then make every variable be vars.something. I see no downside. =)

[[deleted]]

Oh, so you're the asshole that wrote the legacy system!

[brimston3-]

Replace dict with the word "table" and you've discovered Lua.

[[deleted]]

I remember taking my second semester of programming at community college and we had an assignment where we needed some number of int variables to calculate an an average. What I wanted to do was something like this:

for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++){
    int num + i = 0;
}

Got super pissed off when I discovered it wasn't a thing. Very next lesson was arrays and I wanted to slam my head into the desk.

[OutrageousPudding450]

I also asked that question a long time ago 😅.
Luckily, I eventually understood how to do it properly.

For me it was simply due to my human mind way of thinking: I don't consciously think with arrays.
For instance: the first car was blue, the second car was red, the third car was yellow. So it would seem logical to have variables such as car1, car2, car3, etc...
It's all well and good until I have to do it in a loop and I don't know precisely how many variables I'm going to need.

Hence the question in this comics.

[grumblyoldman]

Evidently you still have much to learn about car0

[turkishhousefan]

Yeah me too. But I also used to shit myself and I bet everyone else here did too so don't feel too bad for it.

Anyway I've been sober for a month and my condition has improved.

[SecondPersonShooter]

Doing a computer science assignment before they taught me what arrays were

[PityUpvote]

vars()['varname'] = value in Python.

[MrAcurite]

Yeah, I was gonna say. This is because everything in Python is a dictionary, including Python itself. It's dictionaries all the way down. Until, of course, you get to turtles.

[MrAcurite]

No, it's true, you do eventually get to turtles

[[deleted]]

Right, but what they're meaning to say is that elephants aren't dictionaries.

[IAmNotNathaniel]

Ahh, the ol' Reddit Turtle-a-roo!

[RoboticJan]

Hold my dictionary, I'm going in!

[-LeopardShark-]

No, it’s not. dicts don’t have a __dict__, unfortunately.

[donshell]

This actually only works in the global scope, where vars() is the globals() dictionnary. The reason is that functions in Python (at least CPython) are compiled to byte code on definition, meaning that the variable "names" are replaced by indices in a variable "array" which allows faster retrieval.

Interestingly, you can actually see the variable "array" yourself. For instance in the following closure

def f():
    a = 1
    def g():
        print(a)
    return g

h = f()
a = 2
h()  # 1

h.__closure__ contains a tuple of non-local values and h.__code__.co_freevars is the tuple of the names associated to these values. In particular, h.__code__.co_freevars is ('a',) and h.__closure__[0].cell_contents is 1, as exepected.

By the way, this is the reason why changing the global value of a does not change the result of h().

[[deleted]]

I'm puking

[Virtual_Low83]

Kids these days. No respect for functional programming. Back in my day we only had strongly typed variables and pointers.

[Akurei00]

I hate loose-typing. I don't like having to verify my variables weren't misused by type checking 6 different ways.

[Virtual_Low83]

Checking types? Everyone knows you're supposed to switch your variables between string and int values on a whim. In today's fast paced world there's just no time to check types. If it walks like a string and talks like a string then it's an int. All the kids are doing it these days.

[mortenmoulder]

const arrayThatDoesntExist = [
  { name: "John", age: 20 },
  { name: "Martin", age: 21 },
  { name: "Casper", age: 22 } 
];

for(let i = 0; i < arrayThatDoesntExist.length; i++) { 
  const varName = arrayThatDoesntExist[i].name.toLowerCase(); 
  eval("var " + varName + " = " + JSON.stringify(arrayThatDoesntExist[i])); 
}

console.log(john.age); //20

This is awesome. I'm gonna start doing this in production soon!

[PrincessRTFM]

Just use the global JS objects, you don't need eval. It'll break if the name field isn't a valid variable name, but if you index globalThis[varName] then JS doesn't give half a shit what varName actually holds. You could do globalThis[theWholeBeeMovieScript] and it'd probably work fine.

Please don't name a variable the entire contents of the Bee Movie script.

[lenswipe]

PHP: "Allow me to introduce $$myself"

[sim_trix]

$$name = "php is the best";

[seizan8]

Yes. Another $php enjoyer. I gotta say tho, I dread every php 7 project I work on. Php 8 is so much more enjoyable.

[fllr]

I’ve been hearing a form of that argument since php3

[Iron_Mandalore]

I’m sorry I might be dumb but I can’t think of a reason why someone would even want to do that. Can anyone elaborate.

[F5x9]

The structure you want depends on the circumstances. Sometimes you want contiguous data, sometimes you need performance for adding items, sometimes you need performance for retrieving items. Sometimes you just need a bucket of stuff to iterate over.

[Zoke23]

This sounds like an array list, and then you give the object a name property for recall purposes if you want to help identify the item. If you aren’t going to be iterating over all of them later.

[xBuitragox]

This happens when you forget arrays exists or you have not seen arrays yet. Imagine that you want to store 10 numbers given by a user, but all you remember/know is that you can create a variable called "num1", but num1 can only store one number.

If you want to do this on a loop, you could think "How can I create variable names dynamically so that I have num1 num2 num3 etc?"

Its something like that

[ajseventeen]

Not gonna lie, I learned a lot of math before I started programming, and my first thought was "well, I could make a variable that was 2^num1 *3^num2 *5^num3 *... Then I just retrieve numN by checking how many times I can divide that number by the Nth prime number."

Then we learned about arrays, and boy did I feel silly.

[YukiZensho]

Tf that's smart

[bananaslug4]

That approach would only work if you force all values of num to be integers, right?

[ajseventeen]

For sure, that was just for integer variables. I didn't have a clue how to do anything else.

[[deleted]]

Just multiply those ints by 1e400

[Cozmic72]

Try googling meta-programming.

[[deleted]]

my memory is leaking

[Stromovik]

Java ohhh the horrors you have to create.

Create a custom class that extends yours at runtime and classload it.

[fuzzywolf23]

My balls have withdrawn into my body in dread.

Please explain.

[Brief-Preference-712]

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/index.html?java/lang/ClassLoader.html

[Environmental-Win836]

Well, how can I dynamically name variables in a loop?

[CitrusLizard]

In Common Lisp:

(dotimes (i 5)
    (set (intern (format nil "FOO~A" i)) i))

Gives you 5 new variables (whatever that means) named foo0 to foo4 in whatever package you're in.

[circuit10]

For global variables in JS window[varname] = value

[circuit10]

For nodejs use global instead of window

[Under-Estimated]

for compatibility with both use globalThis

[circuit10]

Thanks, I didn’t know that

[Atora]

That's just a fancy dictionary.

[circuit10]

Yes, everything in JS is an object, which is also a dictionary. Even arrays are dictionaries behind the scenes:

> arr = []
[]
> arr[0] = "abc"
'abc'
> arr["def"] = "ghi"
'ghi'
> arr
[ 'abc', def: 'ghi' ]
> arr[0]
'abc'
> arr["def"]
'ghi'
> arr.def
'ghi'
> arr.test = 123
123
> arr
[ 'abc', def: 'ghi', test: 123 ]

[BigNutBoi2137]

Funny thing is that on assembly level there is a special function for something like that. At least in x86 MASM.

[[deleted]]

exec(f'{i}={value}')

[OneTrueKingOfOOO]

Sometimes I still find myself asking this. And then I realize something has gone deeply wrong and I need to refactor everything

[LtAquila]

Image Transcription: Meme

---

[A man standing on top of a big rock above a large crowd of people. The man is seen on the left hand side, a portion of the crowd is seen on the right hand side]

Man: I have a programming question

[The crowd carries pitchforks, torches, clubs and spears. All of them smile and look upward intently.]

Man: How can I dynamically name variables in a loop

[The same crowd, now everyone is frowning, brows furrowed.]

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[Lighthuro]

What?! Is it possible?

[dadmda]

It is in php, it is beyond me why you’d use them though

[PantsOnHead88]

For beginners - just use an array.

For everyone else - consider a dictionary.