jfc github has been down for over 2 hours. I cannot do anything until it's back up. I wonder how much $ per hour is collectively lost during something like this. It's gotta be staggering.

seems like it's just the website server because I can clone/commit stuff to remote repo's. god this is annoying

The cloud is just someone else's computers

An extreme example of this is the Whitespace programming language. Symbols don't matter - only the whitespace does (space, tabs and newlines.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whit...mming_language)

It was developed by a friend of mine.

This was really good, imo.

Vue > React

but nah

Speaking of React, saw this earlier this week: Things I Don't Know as of 2018

By Dan Abramov, who I think created/maintains React at Facebook. A selection of items:

I think this is quite useful to read and make you feel better about the things you don't know!

That was a weird read. Why would anyone hire this dude if he doesn't know the ins and outs of.. any one thing? Like you've never made a DB query and never made something with flexbox? Weird flex? IDK he's a smart guy but frankly redux could have been replaced with anything that said "hey we need an abstraction over pub/sub for front end, anyone?"

People that cant write bash scripts well really bug me - maybe it’s just me being all linuxy and ivory towery but if you cant write a halfway decent, maintainable script you just dont know how linux works at all.

How much of your dev experience would be relevant if I said "hey, I need you to write me a XAML app backed by a C# REST API and Microsoft SQL Server"? The split between the Windows and Mac/Linux worlds is still pretty deep. I too barely know how to use Unix commands/bash because why would I? Can you tell me how to set up an app on IIS? I have literally never owned nor used for a job any computer running any variant of *nix (aside from cloud stuff). The first job I got out of college was at a company who were a Gold Microsoft Partner and I have remained in that world ever since.

I agree though that it's bizarre to persist in using floats because they ****ing suck. I haven't written a web app from scratch in a while so I'm pretty hazy with flexbox but there is no goddamn way I am ever using floats for layout again.

This explains better than I can why I like Vue more than React:

https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html

with that said i am pretty noobish.

I wanna write a bash script, but I can't think of anything that needs scripting.

so that dudes knows only javascript? baller.

You guys always crack me up. Not knowing those things isn't a big deal (for many roles). And that list is hardly representative of the total space of things that are important in engineering (For example things like: https://overreacted.io/the-elements-of-ui-engineering/).

JMakin, all I'll say is, keep an open mind. I did a bunch of low-level programming when I first graduated. And then I went in a totally different direction in my career and I probably remember 5% of what I learned and use less than 1%. And even now my unix skills are not particularly impressive - I just basically know what I need to know and google anything else. I almost never write bash scripts - and when I do I end up googling for all the stupid ass syntax (or copying some other script). Bash scripts are one of those hammer-like tools that can do a lot but are just massively overused in places where there are better options available.

"You have to (or should) know X" is a timeless statement in CS - it's just that X gradually changes over time.

Old CS nerds always think it's important for everyone else to learn the useless low level stuff they learnt. In my database subject at college, the lecturer, who repeatedly and proudly informed us he had done his Ph. D. on punch cards, taught us COBOL for half the semester, on the grounds that "it's a good introduction to database fundamentals". This would have been a stupid reason even if it were true, which it isn't.

But as this thread shows, its not just "Old" CS nerds.

We're all biased to think the things we know are the things that are important for everyone to know. Which probably makes sense since the things we know are correlated with the things that have been most important for us to know. It's just a highly flawed view of the world since we're always exposed to such a small part of it.

Also, a common discussion I have with people is how just because something is a good idea - doesn't mean we should do it. It should be the "best" (or close to it - after all tradeoffs are considered) idea.

So - even if COBOL was a good introduction to database fundamentals, it almost certainly wasn't close to the best introduction. Or, just because bash scripting can do something, it doesn't mean its the best solution. And so on... and so forth...

On a slightly related note, one factor I think that makes it hard for older developers is that their (our?) older experiences get stale because underlying assumptions change.

I was talking to a developer a little while ago about an AWS service that he wanted to use that I thought wasn't appropriate. But after talking with him it became clear that almost all the limitations of the service I had experienced a few years before had been addressed. So its really important to be able to understand and communicate the underlying reasons for your "in my experience" statements to bulid credibility and to ensure that its still valid.

Bashing old people should be a sin in the IT world because there's a lot of prejudice. I don't know all y'all's ages, but it seems like most of the older people here are working on plenty of brand new stuff and not a bunch of punch card COBOL programmers.

Like everything, stereotypes have a lot of people who don't fit them. Certainly think "those who can't do, teach" was relevant to my story as well.

That’s not what i’m trying to say - i just think if you’re gonna proudly brag about not being able to write a bash script, you shouldnt ever touch anything serious in a *nix system. They’re not super complicated nor should they be.

If you wanted to write a simple installer script for a linux system that should be something anyone halfway competent should be able to do, if the need arose - obviously that’s not something everyone will have to do but idk it’s just a weird “brag” from that guy. Like i get the overall point is just you dont need to be a l33t systems hacker to be successful but that doesnt mean you should skip over the basics of how those systems work.

He didn't say he can't write bash scripts, just that he'd have to look it up. Seems reasonable?

Meh. Purity tests seem kind of stupid, akin to judging someone's skill based on their editor.

I don't think he's bragging. I don't think he's ashamed of not knowing it, but it seems to be in that "imposters syndrome" sphere and he's in a position where he's so well proven professionally that he can talk about this without losing face.

And I don't know what it's like everywhere, but in the medium sized company I worked for a long time ago I got to do some stuff and have a linux machine of my own because I was good friends with someone in SysAd, but generally that sort of thing was verbotten and a higher-level developer wouldn't be allowed to touch something like a bash script. Times were different then though and people didn't develop locally as much, but I can see many companies just not having developers even do stuff like that on "their own" machines.