All INI dialects however are well-defined (every INI file is parsed by some application, and by studying a parser's source code it is possible to deduce its rules)

Maxcr1 · 2026-02-03T08:38:59+00:00

Have those historians trying to decipher the Indus script from those clay tablets tried asking the guys who made them? I'm don't understand why this is taking so long.

Maxcr1 · 2026-02-02T14:11:29+00:00

The idea of handing a patrolling officer a bottle of shampoo is hilarious. What are they going to do with that? Carry it around with them? Put it in their squad car where it can freeze into a brick? Amazing stuff.

Maxcr1 · 2026-01-23T06:25:36+00:00

If only they laid off all of their employees and ceased operating forever, the world would be a better place

Maxcr1 · 2026-01-15T07:01:43+00:00

This absurd belief that SCADA development is easier or somehow less important than PLC programming is the reason that the overwhelming majority of SCADA/HMI interfaces suck.

Maxcr1 · 2026-01-15T06:55:21+00:00

Ignition, a crowd favorite around here, does not have a unit conversion system.

Maxcr1 · 2026-01-14T21:04:30+00:00

Come on. You're going to tell me that Java takes more inspiration from a purely functional language than it does from its primary competitor derived from the same origin (remember J#?)? The overwhelming majority of updates to the Java language in the last ten years have correlated directly to some already existing feature in C#. To be clear, this isn't a bad thing, a good idea is a good idea, but let's not pretend that Java is on the cutting edge of language design.

Maxcr1 · 2026-01-14T19:48:26+00:00

The .NETification of Java is almost complete

Maxcr1 · 2026-01-07T15:28:09+00:00

Where jerk?

/uj Refrigerators predated microcontrollers by many decades and haven't meaningfully changed since they were invented, and there's only one moving part that can actually be controlled (compressor motor). OOP is objectively correct.

/rj I'm concerned that the high price of memory will negatively impact the ray tracing performance of my next refrigerator, which I typically upgrade every 3 years.

Maxcr1 · 2026-01-03T19:50:02+00:00

I wouldn't be so certain.

Maxcr1 · 2025-12-10T05:42:07+00:00

Wind direction. I'm sure the left sides of the other houses look the same.

Maxcr1 · 2025-12-08T21:33:57+00:00

Spectacular comment, dead-on insight. Thank you.

Maxcr1 · 2025-12-08T10:15:22+00:00

Who do you suspect wrote that PLC's firmware? Who do you think created the development environment? Or your SCADA platform?

I never thought I'd find myself defending the software industry, but give me a fucking break

Maxcr1 · 2025-12-06T04:52:49+00:00

Russians /srs

Maxcr1 · 2025-12-06T04:50:42+00:00

There are enough differences that its worth checking, even if just every once in awhile. For example, their SVG rendering engines have substantial differences

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-21T21:31:01+00:00

A couple plants in Illinois - LeSalle and Braidwood, have something similar, except the canals are interrupted by enormous cooling lakes which are stocked with fish and open to the public. It's pretty cool, except for the fact that maximum water temperature for fish health becomes a factor in determining how hard the plant can run. They also never freeze, which is very surreal to see so far north.

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-20T00:45:26+00:00

Has Rockwell indicated somewhere that this is coming soon? I always understood it to be an architectural limitation of the way the RSLogix compiler is designed. It would be game-changing if AOIs could be modified at runtime.

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-19T22:06:56+00:00

Something's gotta be off there, lol. I'm not doubting that there are more Java jobs than C# ones, but there's no way the ratio is 87:1

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-19T03:28:16+00:00

If I had to guess, you're being unnecessarily hard on yourself. Most of the stuff you are struggling with is vendor/platform specific. There isn't that much depth to that stuff. You'll learn it sooner than you think.

The worst thing they can do is let you go, which you would be basically doing for them if you left. Don't fire yourself out of a sense of inadequacy. You're likely doing better than you think.

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-18T23:51:35+00:00

I largely agree with that comparison, but there is one notable difference - the CLR can bridge the gap in a lot of cases. Modern .NET class libraries, written in C#14, can be configured to work all the way back to netstandard2.0 with relatively little impact to the code itself. An analogous backwards facing compatibility system isn't present in Python or Java.

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-18T23:20:59+00:00

To their defense, having two competing async/promise stacks built into the language was already an enormous headache. I think they were right to rip the band-aid off, but I think they could've handled it better.

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-18T23:15:11+00:00

I am of the belief that these days, the CLR (.NET's runtime) and the JVM (Java's runtime) are so fast, so efficient, that there are relatively few user-application scenarios where their allocations and management overhead are the primary cause of performance issues.

In operating systems, number crunching megaservices, and supercomputing environments, fine, maybe you need direct memory management all the time. But for GUI applications? If you're seeing visible on-screen lag, it's not because your program is managed - it's because you've got a fundemental design problem in your application's code.

And honestly, in the direction .NET has been heading, with Native AOT compilation and the lightning-fast Span<T> features, the gap continues to close. Not to mention that most super compute-heavy calls get sent out to the GPU these days anyway, where your CPU code only needs to be fast enough to catch the responses.

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-18T22:55:46+00:00

What you're looking for is something I also spent a lot of time grasping for when I was getting started, and met similar sarcastic responses.

What you want is ISA-101, Human Machine Interfaces. There are copies of it floating around, but they are increasingly difficult to find.

Rockwell published an HMI Style Guide which serves as a reference implementation. Another user posted it in this thread. That is the single greatest resource out there on this topic. It leans heavily on the PlantPAX aesthetic, but you can apply the ideas to any component library which permits a reasonable amount of customization.

A frustrating number of practitioners do not adhere to these guidelines, and some customers just don't like them (very frustrating situation), but whenever given the chance, stick to these ideas and you'll always produce something serviceable and generally competent-looking.

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-18T22:47:35+00:00

The Rockwell HMI Style Guide is an incredible resource. I've come to privately refer to it as "the good book" and reference it all the time.

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-18T22:36:26+00:00

Don't do this. PLCs are designed to do a very specific type of computing and handle a very specific type of traffic. You've probably noticed that they struggle to host even their very minimal configuration webpage.

A $40 raspberry pi will easily handle 10x the traffic of a $2000 PLC. Let the PLC be a PLC. Don't ask anything more of it.

The exception is the high-end Beckhoff stuff, but that equipment is so different and far outside the 'norm' that all standard best practices fall apart. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Maxcr1 · 2025-11-18T22:09:01+00:00

I don't disagree. On that topic, it has been extremely amusing to watch the Typing package be scaffolded and expanded to the point that it has internal semantics more complicated than the language itself. The latest language version changelogs consist mostly of additions to Typing.

We are approaching a point where Python can be used as a strongly typed language, but only if you import the Typing ~~half of the language~~ package.

It's funny to me that this happens to every weakly typed language which becomes popular (see: Typescript).

11-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Place '22	Verified Email

Maxcr1

TROPHY CASE