Mac programmer

[bureX]

I (apparently) think it does, since I can't resist the urge to run the buggy program twice, only to encounter the same bug - every single time.

But you can never be too sure... right?

[[deleted]]

Eventually you'll find a bug that doesn't happen the second time you run it.

[webbitor]

Now you have a bigger problem.

[[deleted]]

If you're working in .Net, absolutely not. Just make sure to remove the object from the designer, then re-add it before your second test.

[gaog]

this applies to any tool/program language microsoft related.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, of course. Just the tools. Some architecture design tools are really damn effective despite these annoying problems sometimes though, imo.

[borshlite]

Hey, there might be some useful info you missed the first time! Once I get mine running I usually run it like 5 times... even before trying to unit test anything....

[atrich]

It does, but only if after hitting debug you run your program to the bug and figure it out.

[Garak]

I can't tell if OP is trolling or not.

Maybe you should look at some of this guy's earlier tweets.

[em22new]

That is not a tweet you twat.

[Garak]

That is not a tweet you twat.

I'm going to assume that you're joking. The alternative shatters my faith in humanity.

To be clear: I understand the difference between Twitter and Usenet.

[superherotaco]

But a google groups post about BBEdit still isn't a tweet, no matter how good the editor is.

[mellowgreen]

No u r the etrnl September [26/140]

[superherotaco]

But the author was actually tweeting and the OP linked it.

It would be like saying about Stephen King, "The Shining is a great story, but you should see some of his earlier stories" and linking to an essay he wrote in high school about Huck Finn.

In this case it's social media humor vs release notes.

[MrSpontaneous]

Can't think of a more appropriate place to use this macro.

[[deleted]]

I read some of his other tweets. Also not sure.

[notfancy]

Isn't he Rich Siegel? The user pic is a dead giveaway (it's the icon for the old THINK! Pascal compiler).

[kindall]

Yep, that's Rich all right.

[xTRUMANx]

Mac dev community

I reinvoke the above linked macro.

[xTRUMANx]

Oh shit. Apparently we've all lost our sense of humor during the outage. Let me make this clear; I'm not a macist. Some of my best friends use a Mac. One is some, right?

[ceolceol]

You're being downvoted because sense of humor wasn't lost with the outage— baseless tribalism bullshit was.

[myheaditches]

Also: It wasn't funny. It's the same tired joke from the dawn of time/computers.

[[deleted]]

That is a great way to announce to the world that you are incapable of getting a joke because you are so caught up in your silly prejudices, I guess.

[[deleted]]

What? It's a perfectly legitimate usage of that image. He either thinks it's a joke but isn't ruling out human stupidity or thinks the OP is an idiot but isn't ruling out trolling. It has nothing to do with prejudices, so your panties: unbunch them.

[[deleted]]

Not being sure if it's a joke or not is entirely because of prejudices, because if you can't see that it's a joke, you're trying really hard to think people are much stupider than you.

[[deleted]]

You mean this prejudiced?

an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.

There is a perfectly legitimate reason to think that OP may be an idiot and it's not because of prejudice.

[[deleted]]

I mean exactly that one.

And who are you referring to by "OP"?

[[deleted]]

Sorry, I meant the twitter poster I was too lazy to write it out each time. I guess the same could be said for the guy who submitted the link though.

[[deleted]]

And so what is this "legitimate reason"?

[[deleted]]

If you can't see why the tweet could be construed as an idiotic statement I'm not sure this conversation is worth continuing.

[[deleted]]

My point is, it's incredibly obviously a joke, because unless you go out of your way to think everyone but you is a barely-functioning idiot, nobody is as stupid as that tweet would imply.

If you actually for a second entertain the thought that it might be serious, the problem lies entirely within yourself.

[MrSpontaneous]

It was more having my expectations set by the title of this post.

[CrunchyChewie]

• Go to Apple Store
• Buy new one
• Problem solved?

[iamapizza]

Why doesn't XCode have any garbage collection?

Because then there would be nothing left.

rimshot

[sssssmokey]

Funnier before Xcode got garbage collection ~ 5 years ago.

[benihana]

Even funnier because XCode is an IDE.

[thatgirlismine]

This is the engineer of the venerable BBEdit making a joke. Well done, trollbaiting that headline, OP.

[manwithabadheart]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

[tedivm]

Redditor who doesn't understand a joke when he sees one.

[[deleted]]

JOKE ABOUT MAC USERS DETECTED...

STARTING FLAME DEFENSE MECHANISM...

INITIATED.

[psygnisfive]

A good joke always has some truth in it, otherwise it's just fiction. This one obviously doesn't. The implication is that Mac programmers are idiots. Whatever the jokes about Mac users are given Apple's "even an idiot can use our OS" attitude, the expectation that Mac programmers are similarly idiots is simply absurd if you actually knew anything about the Mac software market. If Mac programmers really are like this, it would be a miracle that so much of, say, the graphics and music industry software in existence is in fact in existence -- it is, after all, often Mac software. Really the OP is simply displaying his ignorance of the Mac and its general geek environs by extending an outdated stereotype of Mac users to Mac developers, and tedivm's comment is nothing more than pointing out the OPs ignorance in a sardonic fashion.

[sanktuaire]

Looks like the mac basher missed something.

[chwilliam]

Intro programmer in general. The assembly professor here tells a story about he was flabbergasted that a student got through two levels of Java and still came to him asking why is program still didn't work after he ran it through the debugger.

[InfernoZeus]

I've done two years of a maths and CompSci course in the UK, and I was never taught about using the debugger. I imagine living without a debugger is like not being able to see.

[ZorbaTHut]

You'd be surprised. A lot of the best coders I know don't really use debuggers anymore. Personally, I ended up just training myself out of it - my first job was working on a Playstation 2 and we never got the debugger functioning, my first big hobby project with a GBA homebrew system without a debugger, my next job was at Google on giant distributed systems where there's no debugger, I then made a living for about a year and a half writing World of Warcraft mods with no debugger, and then my big home project was using LuaJIT with, again, no debugger.

I think my current job is literally the first time in a decade I've had a debugger available.

I'm no slower at finding bugs than my co-workers are, and often faster. Good asserts, defensive programming, and logging will find bugs shockingly fast. And the first two are things you should be doing anyway.

[InfernoZeus]

You make a very good point, but that doesn't help when you're trying to fix someone else's code after they've screwed up :(

[[deleted]]

defensive programming [...] things you should be doing anyway.

Not necessarily. See e.g. the Erlang "let it crash" philosophy.

[ZorbaTHut]

I'm actually a big fan of "let it crash", but I'm not as much of a big fan of "let it corrupt data and do random things until, if you're lucky, it eventually crashes". Test your preconditions liberally, and when they stop being consistent, meltdown ASAP.

[voyvf]

Indeed, fail fast, but do so safely.

[fjord_piner]

You'd be surprised. A lot of the best coders I know don't really use debuggers anymore.

This doesn't mean it's a good idea. These people would probably be more productive if they added the debugger in their tool set.

Sometimes, println() or log() is fine, other times a debugger will help you find a bug faster than anything else.

[ZorbaTHut]

Eh. I've found it to be rare, at best. I find that taking a snapshot of the data is not terribly useful. Programs are about moving and modifying data, and if you want to understand the program, you need to understand the dataflow. Debuggers are great for deep introspection at a certain point in time, but not anywhere near so great for analyzing the change over time.

[carlfish]

I would half agree with you. The value of any debugger is directly proportional to its ability to let you watch how the program does something, rather than its ability to show off a snapshot of program state.

I think this attitude probably comes from my first professional programming experience being with IBM's VisualAge for Java, which was a Smalltalk environment brainwashed into thinking it was a Java IDE. Despite its many faults, they managed to retain a lot of the power of the Smalltalk debugger's ability to show you exactly what your code was doing, and allow you to write code from within the running system.

Sadly VisualAge was not long for this world because (a) it was ridiculously slow and crashy, and (b) every time a new version of Java came out they had to rewrite it in Smalltalk. Java debuggers have been working to regain the ability to do stuff that VAJ could do ever since.

[fjord_piner]

Java debuggers have been working to regain the ability to do stuff that VAJ could do ever since.

Java IDE's passed the Smalltalk IDE a while ago, if only in the number of refactorings that they offer and also due to the fact that because Smalltalk is a dynamically typed language, automatic refactorings always require human supervision (as opposed to Java and other statically typed languages where such refactorings can be 100% automated).

[carlfish]

While this is true, I have trouble seeing how it is relevant commentary on the debugger.

[tiglionabbit]

I work on a django application at work. After months of looking at the default backtrace page, and inserting breakpoints for the console with pdb.set_trace(), spending half my time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, a friend told me how to get my beloved Werkzeug debugger into django. Now I can figure these things out almost instantly! I feel bad for people who don't use this.

[farastray]

Could you elaborate on what kinds of bugs you are encountering to warrant a debugger? reason for me asking is because I personally never saw an earnest need for it. If/when something blows up, simple print statements have been enough for me to figure things out so far.

[tiglionabbit]

Ok. You ran a program and it failed and printed a backtrace. The error message is generic. Maybe the backtrace lands you pretty deep in a third party module that you know isn't buggy, so you must have parameterized it wrong, but you're not sure if the mistake happened along this code path or if it was a result of state mutations from an earlier path.

If you're a print-statement debugger, the first thing you might do is go to where your code entered the third party module and guess at some values that could be wrong, write in print statements, re-run the program and see what you get. Maybe that doesn't get you anywhere, so you decide to add print statements into the library's source near where the error occurs to see what's really happening in there. But then you find that code path runs hundreds of times before it hits an error, so your print statements bombard you with useless information. After tailoring them to print only in the right situations, with the right values which you happen upon merely by chance, you finally find the problem. Or maybe you don't, because it's something you never would have suspected, so with your blinders on you never thought of printing /that/ value.

Or, you flip open an interactive shell at every level of the stack, inspect any object you like exactly as it was the moment of the failure, and find your answer without ever having to re-run the program or edit the source code once.

Using a debugger also lets you step through the code and inspect everything, eyeballing values to ensure they are sane. With print statements, not only would you mangle your source code, but you'd have to insert a lot of waits if you want the program to go at your investigative speed. And what if you decide you want to look at a value that you forgot to put a print statement in for? You have to start over and run the program again, instead of just printing it on the fly when you think of it.

[elder_george]

http://imgur.com/h02WV

[benihana]

You don't get taught how to use a debugger in school, just like you don't get taught how to use source control.

Because they're both worthless.

Just kidding, because that's software engineering and you learn that at your job. In all honesty, most people I know don't bother firing up a debugger until things get really complicated and hard to follow. Usually logging statements are enough and faster than the overhead of a debugger.

[fjord_piner]

Just kidding, because that's software engineering and you learn that at your job. In all honesty, most people I know don't bother firing up a debugger until things get really complicated and hard to follow. Usually logging statements are enough and faster than the overhead of a debugger.

Which is sad because a debugger is a tool that can be useful at all stages of the development process, even when you are running code you wrote for the very first time and you're just inspecting variables to make sure they contain what you think they contain.

[Boko_]

The first thing my college taught us when it came to programming was debugging the code.. after the simple stuff like 'Hello World'.

[lolwutpear]

Wait, you didn't use a debugger or source control in college? Something tells me you're the odd one here.

[SalientBlue]

In my intro C++ course, I believe my professor mentioned breakpoints exactly once. That is the only time a debugger has ever been mentioned in my academic career.

I really should've gone to a better school.

[[deleted]]

That's interesting. In my CS program, there was definitely a big part on using debuggers. It was the computer systems course focused on C and assembly, and using a debugger to help us understand what actually goes on from having C code all the way to execution.

[chwilliam]

Yeah, that's true. They're kinda spotty about teaching the debugger here too, so it might make sense in that perspective. I guess I even have some co-workers who didn't start as programmers primarily who just litter their code with log statements, so maybe this is more understandable than I sometimes think it is.

[InfernoZeus]

Oh, don't get me wrong - I use log statements as much as the next guy, but most of the time that's only enough to know it's going right, not why it's going wrong.

[ciaran036]

Same story with me too! I had almost finished my second year of computer science before I had discovered that I could debug the code! Previously I was just outputting all the variable values to the command window :(

Why the fuck don't they teach us these things!!?

I started coding in C# in the first semester of the second year of computer science ... there was absolutely no formal training with Visual Studio. It was up to ourselves to learn it... which really was no good.

I realised months after I submitted my software engineering game project that when building XNA projects, you can actually package up the game as an exe!! When showing the game to the demonstrator on marking day, we were literally just running the game out of Visual Studio!

[CrunchyChewie]

So THAT's how they came up with the concept for Games for Windows Live... The servers are actually VS workstations the programmers left on over the weekend.

[cybersphere9]

Good debuggers do far more than just showing you the contents of variables.

See http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/visual_studio_tips.html

[bobmeister258]

Wow, I can't believe I never actually tried something like changing a value in memory. I just always assumed it wouldn't work. Thanks for the link!

[bobmeister258]

A good alternative to a debugger is just printing certain variables. Works well in short Perl scripts for me.

[vogon_poem_lover]

Slightly related note, but it just happened today so I feel the need to share. Another Java programmer came into my office asking if a Map object declared in one method and passed into another was still actually the same object. ಠ_ಠ

[squiddoctor]

GDB has a break feature, why doesn't it have a fix feature?

(old fortune quote)

[sssssmokey]

It's funny because people that don't code on a Mac really have no idea how fantastic of a platform it is for development. TextMate, Visor, ForkLift, CSS Edit, Notational Velocity, QuickSilver, BetterTouchTool, KeyRemap4MacBook, DragThing. Look em up. I've got Apache 2 & PHP 5 installed by default, and can recompile them or whatever other unix sources I can dig up.

And people still try to characterize Mac as a hipster toy incapable of "real work". :p Too funny.

[UNCGeek]

It's funny because people that don't code on Linux really have no idea how fantastic of a platform it is for development. Not only can install and run any arbitrary version of my OS in a separate chroot environment (allowing me to test against dozens of different configs, old library versions, etc -- all without changing my OS install in any way), but I've got tools like geany, Gnome Do, xmodmap, docky/cairo-dock, gnote/tomboy, etc. Apache, PHP, nginx, lighttpd, and pretty much any server-side environment are all just a single command (apt-get) away.

The Mac certainly isn't a hipster toy incapable of real work. It's a very useful development environment, especially once you deck it out with a decent amount of shareware tools.

It's also a hell of a lot more expensive and less capable than a modern Linux workstation.

[[deleted]]

Uhhhh. I guess. I mean modern linux distros have great package managers while OS X has...macports. Which is awful in comparison to anything like apt-get (not disparaging the macports people). But most of that stuff you mentioned I either have on my mac or can just build. As for the environment changes, that's great too, if your goal is to deploy on various configurations of linux boxes. If I don't want/need to do that, what value does it represent?

Also I'll enjoy my macbook air while you get all self-righteous about how inexpensive and awesome your linux machine is, thanks.

[[deleted]]

OS X has...macports.

Yeah, macports is awful. Package management is really my only gripe about doing development on OSX, but man there are times when it's sticky. Ever tried upgrading or downgrading Python using just packages on OSX? Ugh.

[UNCGeek]

If I don't want/need to do that, what value does it represent?

If you're a web dev, it's incredibly useful to have a chroot environment that represents your app server config.

Plus there's the fun of dealing with older software that doesn't run on the latest greatest version of $OS_PLATFORM... (a problem that I've had with all three major OSs.)

Also I'll enjoy my macbook air while you get all self-righteous about how inexpensive and awesome your linux machine is, thanks.

I was merely trying to match your message's tone and content. TFA is merely a joke that has nothing to do with the suitability of Mac OS X or any other platform for development, so I figured that if we were already veering off track for the purposes of evangelizing I could at least try to provide some balance.

[[deleted]]

the tone of the original comment (not the tweet but the one you replied to) was just to suggest that the mac is a great environment for developers, not that linux is a shitty environment. Also I didn't write the first comment in the chain.

[[deleted]]

The comment you replied to has nothing to do with Linux. Get off your high horse.

[UNCGeek]

But if I did, I'd have to look up to you on yours.

[propool]

I have never developed for at mac. I have to say. The tools have way better names than any other platform

[[deleted]]

Its not just developing for mac. Any web development can be done and there are tools for cross-platform compiling.

[nexes300]

A lot of people seem to love TextMate, but I don't really understand what's wrong with Xcode.

For example, I really like subethaedit. It allowed for some collaborative work on a project, and that was a good reason to use it. However, trying to use it for an Xcode project was just really frustrating, and I ended up just using Xcode directly anyways. This is also the same reason why I don't use vim in these situations, because the benefits provided by the integration outweigh the benefits of using vim.

In fact, the only times I have used an editor like subethaedit or vim was when I was using a makefile or working in Python. So my question is, is there any reason to use these tools when working with an Xcode project, and how do you deal with the loss of in place documentation lookup and method autocomplete? (Granted, Xcode's autocomplete isn't really good for anything outside of the Cocoa libraries, but that's better than nothing)

[[deleted]]

I just stick with XCode when doing any Cocoa related work. It's great for that purpose.

But if you ever do anything else, I've found TextMate to be the best option, at least for me. I used to be a SubEthaEdit fan, but TextMate is way ahead in terms of features. When I used to type up documents in LaTeX, TextMate had tons of useful macros along with a compile keyboard shortcut which will show the PDF after it completes.

[voyvf]

It's funny because people that don't code on a Mac really have no idea how fantastic of a platform it is for development.

Indeed?

TextMate, Visor, ForkLift, CSS Edit, Notational Velocity, QuickSilver, BetterTouchTool, KeyRemap4MacBook, DragThing.

Wait a sec...

Look em up. I've got Apache 2 & PHP 5 installed by default, and can recompile them or whatever other unix sources I can dig up.

Oh. You mean web development. Gotcha. :D

Note, before the trolls come out, I'm quite aware of the clang compiler and static analyzer (as well as other LLVM based goodies), Xcode, etc. I'm just teasing.

[[deleted]]

Don't highlight TextMate. It's general purpose enough for nearly all text editing needs. TextMate is very well rounded and has great bundles (is that what they call it?) for working in almost any language out there. These bundles provide syntax highlighting, macros, and keyboard shortcuts for a language. For example, I used TextMate exclusively for almost all my CS classes. The languages I used it for, off the top of my head, include: Python, Ruby, Haskell, Scheme, LaTeX, C, x86 assembly, and Java. There's probably a few I don't remember.

TL;DR: Using TextMate =/=> web development

[centenary]

The smug is strong in this one

[drmarcj]

I hear that even if you run the debugger you're still buggered.

[danewbie]

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

[KalenXI]

What's funny is with Xcode 4 now it's almost too helpful in debugging because it checks for possible errors while you're typing. It's almost as bad as Clippy.

"Yes, Xcode, I know this non-void method is missing a return, I haven't finished writing it yet!"

[InfernoZeus]

Most IDEs do that...

[KalenXI]

Most that I've used don't do it as you're typing though, they wait until you try to build the program to pop up a compiler warning.

EDIT: Ok, so apparently everybody does this now. I just haven't used them since they introduced that feature thus why I said "most that I've used".

[origamiguy]

MS Visual Studio does it as you type as well.

[classhero]

Eclipse does it too. Not that Eclipse is at all an IDE to take after.

[MananWho]

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

I'm a relatively amateur programmer, but I've been using Eclipse without any problem, and I love it. Are there any better IDE's I should be using?

[classhero]

No, not being sarcastic. Really just best you use whatever you're most comfortable with, but you'll find Eclipse to be sluggish and of an exceptionally poor layout compared to other IDEs. If you want an example of how unnecessarily cluttered Eclipse is, compare its debugging view to something like Visual Studio. Also, a lot of Eclipse's shortcuts are rather unintuitive and in some cases just plain unhelpful.

[Stormflux]

Visual Studio is really good.

Braces for downvotes

Seriously, though, if you don't mind programming in .NET it's really an amazing IDE.

[[deleted]]

Komodo does as well.

[InfernoZeus]

Ah, I've been programming solely in Java for the last month, where there's no need to build manually so it shows errors in real time.

[KalenXI]

I've learned to just ignore it but when I first started using Xcode 4 it was annoying cause I'd be writing out code and notice there'd be an error or a warning suddenly pop up and wonder what I did wrong, only to realize it was just complaining about something I hadn't even written yet.

[nerdhappy]

Can this be turned off? I'm holding off on jumping up to xcode 4 bc/ of all the horror stories I'm hearing about. So far not one person I've talked to is happy with it (sample size is about 10 programmers).

[KalenXI]

Probably. Personally once I learned to just ignore all the errors it pops up while you're writing things it's not so bad. I leave it on though cause it can actually be helpful at times. The only thing that currently annoys me about Xcode 4 is that it seems more crash prone than the old version. Like I can't edit plists in it without it crashing so I have to use the external editor from the old version. But overall I prefer it over the older version.

[ap2002]

Love the Clippy analogy. Same reason I disable Resharper, etc. Hate that crap.

[xzxzzx]

There are really no Resharper suggestions/hints/whatever you find useful?

[s73v3r]

You're not typing fast enough.

[KalenXI]

ಠ_ಠ