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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Ironically, one of the universal things I’ve noticed in programmers (myself included) is that newbie coders always go through a phase of thinking “why am I writing SQL? I’ll write a set of classes to write the SQL for me!” resulting in a massively overcomplicated mess that is a hundred times harder to use (and maintain) than a simple SQL statement would be. The most hilarious example of this I ever saw was when I took over a young colleague’s code base and found two classes named “OR.cs” and “AND.cs”. All they did was take a String as a parameter, append " OR " or " AND " to it, and return it as the output. Very forward-thinking, in case the meanings of “OR” and “AND” were ever to change in future versions of SQL.





  • I started watching TV cooking shows in the late 90s (e.g. Good Eats, Iron Chef, Naked Chef etc.) and I would just cook what I saw for my friends. They were all “wow ChickenLady you’re such an amazing chef” for a few years until they started watching that shit themselves. Then they were all “you should have used white balsamic vinegar and black garlic in that”.









  • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldCVS style
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    17 days ago

    I was just in a literal CVS an hour ago and they have a sign on the receipt printer that says “please don’t grab receipt until it is done printing.” It’s like, shouldn’t the fact that you had to write a sign like that be an indicator that you’re printing out too much shit?


  • I used to work for an organization in Atlanta that was similar to Habitat for Humanity but smaller. Our mission was to build and rehab housing for homeless people. Ironically, our typical project involved buying an “abandoned” house that was actually occupied by a large number of squatters. The first step was us carpenters going in with shovels and axes and whatnot and rousting everybody out. We would then do an absurdly overpriced renovation on a property that would have been cheaper to tear down and rebuild from scratch, and then the house would be sold to a single family that was relatively well-off enough to afford a mortgage. I was too young to realized it at the time, but I think the whole thing was just a charity scam being run by the CEO.


  • That’s what happened to Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Cool concept but laughably unsupported by basic Physics. Niven had to write a sequel not because anybody wanted to see more of his characters but because he was tired of readers telling him what a moron he was.

    The Integral Trees was a way better concept and much better thought out.




  • It’s funny, the exact same logic applies to method and variable names. There’s no compiler that ensures that a method’s name accurately describes what the method does or ensures that a variable’s name accurately describes what the variable represents. Yet nobody ever says “you shouldn’t use descriptive method and variable names because they might be misleading”. And this is hardly academic: I can’t count the number of times I’ve run into methods that no longer do what the method name implies they do.

    And yet method and variable names are exactly what people mean when they talk about “self-documenting” code.