#Programming Stack

[nibinsects]

boring govt meetings

[computer-nerd-girl]

[mumpsetc]

Stick in the Mud

[secondwheel]

Masters of the old

[ishgard]

an impasse

Sphene had already made her deal with Zoraal Ja, there would be no wresting power from the King of Resolve. Yet even so it seemed no matter what recourse he offered, Queen Sphene would not - or perhaps, could not- accept any of it. Even so their relationship remained distantly amicable, even if quietly fraught.

I figure as much relative autonomy Sphene may or may not have had, there was simply no going against the plans that were laid out or the systems in place to support them - which he harbored his own suspicions about.

She did, however, use what power she had to support Kyanite's elusion of being discovered by Zoraal Ja. And while he couldn't exactly go about trying to dissuade and convince her as much as he may have wished, he never gave up hope that one day she would see the reason for which she was named.

[commodorez]

This printer appears to be working properly.

[lonestarflight]

Workers lift Gemini 1 to mate it with its Titan II rocket.

"CAPE KENNEDY, PLA. PAD 19-the Gemini I spacecraft is raised to the top of the gantry for mating to the Titan II launch vehicle. Prime objective of the First Gemini-Titan II flight is to demonstrate the structural compatibility of the spacecraft and launch vehicle from launch through orbital insertion."

Date: March 3, 1964

NASA ID: 104-КSС65-2256, link, 64-GT 1-26, 64-GT 1-33

[cheriboms]

call that an intergenerational language barrier 🙅

[hearteyedfeelings]

That CON VER SA TION WOWEEEE. So so needed and for so so long. Just gonna type my inital thoughts cause I want to and why not.

Laudna. Dear Laudna, oh you poor loveable naive dummy. (Said with so much love). She grew up alone. Yes she had her parents and maybe the odd friend here or there but she grew up alone. And then she died in the most horrific way, alone. She woke up alone. She then spent 30 years of her life alone- but this time even more so with her own killer in her head feeding her.

And then she met Imogen, beautiful capable Imogen. A light in her lonely life, the first real light. Now she’s seen Imogen grow in power, in confidence. And she feels like her loneliness, her insecurity, her own head is bringing the love of her life down. She thinks she’s keeping her from flying but she doesn’t realize she’s keeping her from flying too high.

Imogen has been on step away from falling in with Predathos since she first felt the pull. The only thing, just like the words out of Imogen’s lips, the only thing that’s keeping her grounded is Laudna. Imogen’s heart is out walking around as a dead but not so dead woman with a rat bird as a familiar. Without her she’s, well we saw, she’s desperate. Willing to bargain with the her love’s killer to get her back. She’s sleeping with her dead body and ready to fight the Lord and Lady of Whitestone, the city of Whitestone. She tore down a city block, she exhalted, she crawled into hell after her. Laudna is Imogen’s tether, her red thread wrapped around her wrist, without her there isn’t.

Without Imogen- Laudna doesn’t have her light, her anchor keeping her from falling back into the dark.

Without Laudna Imogen flies too high never to be seen again.

They’re co-dependent. They’re ready to destroy the world to get the other back. They never want to leave one another. They want to protect each other above all else- the gods, Predathos, Exandria be damned.

They’re also scared.

Laudna is scared she’s holding Imogen down.

Imogen is scared Laudna will leave her and fall away.

They’re ride or die in the worst and best ways. I’m so curious to see how their story goes. I’d like to believe they have a happy ending though. Maybe. Probably not, but hey it’s good to have some hope and crazier things have happened eh? It’s D&D after all.

[roibot]

every now and then I think about the fact that Kaori Sakamoto

[computer-nerd-girl]

[awizardmostkitty]

would it be possible to like... ask for programming advice? there's some really smart ppl around and to be honest I've confused myself a bit too much perhaps haha. explaining more below the cut because it's a bit of a lengthy explanation.

essentially I'm trying to parse an ID string into the way I'm formatting my json files. the format looks like this:

{

"name" : (name, string),

"id" : (id, string, they look like "e[a]" or "d[e[a]]^o.d.o" or something like that, there's a lot of variety),

"op_count" : (int, the number of individual runes combined to create this one. Each rune could be made up of smaller runes, so if I know which runes are in it I can reduce the op_count by combining those rather than each one individually),

"operations" : {

"base": {

"path" : (filepath to that rune's json, optional)

(if "path" isn't here, then either it already has the json, or else it's empty, as is the case for a combination like "('[n.k.n.k]', o)" which begins with a group rather than a single rune)

},

"op": (either one or sometimes two characters specifying which operation is performed),

"mod" : {

(Follows the same structure as "base")

}

}

there's a couple more quirks to this. If there's multiple operations, then each operation and mod will be "op#" and "mod#" with # being which operation it is. Grouping symbols like "[", "(", "'[", or "'(" follow a slightly different format for applying an operation, they instead become part of the mod, without really advancing the count of the mod# unless it's something like a group within a group. Here's an example of a completed one, I've done a number of these by hand which is why I have it:

{ "name": "Laughing", "id": "('[n.k.n.k]', o)", "op_count": 3, "operations": { "base": {}, "op1": "", "mod": { "type":"()", "mod1":{ "type":"'[]'", "mod1":{"path":"res://scripts/json/yes.json"}, "op2":".", "mod2":{ "path":"res://scripts/json/yes.json"} }, "op3":",", "mod3":{ "path":"res://scripts/json/action.json"} } } }

Because I've done a number of these by hand already, I'd rather not change the format, but if it's absolutely necessary then I'll push on through.

I've gotten it so that I have a list of each composite rune ID as well as a list of how many operations have been performed by the time that ID appears in the list, and a second list of each operation (opening and closing a group are considered separate operations until they're in the json, so that I can figure out where a group ends) and how many rune IDs have been seen by the time that operation is performed.

This sort of allows me to cross reference the list to get an idea of what happens where, but I've driven my brain right out of my head trying to figure out how to use these to get a string like "a.(b,c)" to turn into something like:

{

"name" : (name),

"id" : "a.(b,c)",

"op_count": 2,

"operations":{

"base": { (data for "a") },

"op1": ".",

"mod": {

"type" : "()",

"mod1": { (data for "b") },

"op2" : ",",

"mod2": { (data for "c") }

} } }

I don't know if I've made any sense at all, I'm not a bad programmer I promise I've just spun myself in circles over this 😅

no need to worry about where I get the data for "a," "b," and "c," that part's taken care of. Just need to parse the id string into the json format if I can.

[prince-ically]

Terapagos

Itty Bitty Terapagos, so cute.

n e way So- I really like making Gijinka's, I used to be kinda shit at drawing actual pokemon so I just made them people since I was alright at drawing those- problem solved!

I have a few others in wip hell but i Do have a finished Ogerpon,,, +extra older terapagos sketch

Ogerpon needs to go through the design washer 1 more time but fr now i really like her

[blubberquark]

Your Code Is Hard To Read!

This is one of those posts I make not because I think my followers need to hear them, but because I want to link to them from Discord from time to time. If you are a Moderator, Contributor or "Helpfulie" on the PyGame Community Discord, I would welcome your feedback on this one!

"You posted your code and asked a question. We can't answer your question. Your code is hard to read."

Often when we tell people this, they complain that coding guidelines are just aesthetic preferences, and they didn't ask if their code followed coding guidelines. They asked us to fix the bug. That may be so, but the problem remains: If you ask us to fix your code, we can only help you if we can read it.

Furthermore, if there are many unrelated bugs, architectural problems, and hard to understand control flow, the concept of fixing an isolated bug becomes more and more unclear.

In order to fix unreadable code, you could:

eliminate global variables

replace magic numbers with constants

replace magic strings with enumerations

name classes, functions, constants, variables according to consistent coding standards

have functions that do one thing and one thing only like "collision detection" or "collision handling". If your function does two things at the same time, like rendering AND collision detection, then it must be refactored

rewrite deeply nested and indented code to be shallower

rewrite code that keeps a lot of state in local variables into special-case functions

use data structures that make sense

write comments that explain the program, not comments that explain the programming language

delete unneccessary/unreachable code from the question to make it easier to read or from your program to see if the problem persists

My own programs often violate one or more of those rules, especially when they are one-off throwaway scripts, or written during a game jam, or prototypes. I would never try to ask other people for help on my unreadable code. But I am an experienced programmer. I rarely ask for help in an unhelpful way. Almost never ask for help in a way that makes other experienced programmers ask for more code, or less code, or additional context. I post a minimal example, and I usually know what I am doing. If I don't know what I am doing, or if I need suggestions about solving my problem completely differently, I say so.

Beginner programmers are at a disadvantage here. They don't know what good code looks like, they don't know what good software architecture looks like, they don't know how to pare down a thousand lines of code to a minimal example, and if they try to guess which section of code contains the error, they usually guess wrong.

None of this matters. It may be terribly unfair that I know how to ask smart questions, and beginner programmers ask ill-posed questions or post code that is so bad it would be easier and quicker for an experienced programmer to re-write the whole thing. It is often not feasible to imagine what the author might have intended the code to work like and to fix the bugs one by one while keeping the structure intact. This is not a technical skill, this is a communicative and social skill that software engineers must pick up sooner or later: Writing code for other people to read.

If your code is too hard to read, people can't practically help you.

It gets worse. Unreadable code is sometimes unreadable because it is un-salvageable. It is hard to understand because there is nothing to understand, it would not work, and you need to go back to the drawing board.

Defensive Responses

This is not where the problem ends. Often, after a couple of rounds of back and forth, after questions like "Well, you say there is a bug, but can you tell me what you would want the code to do in the first place?", or "Is this a class or an instance? If it's supposed to be an instance variable, could you give it a lowercase name?" or "Could you give that variable _obj a more descriptive name? It looks like you are assigning different things to this variable in different parts of your loop. Perhaps you could use two variables with different, more descriptive names", you see a defensive response. The original question asker is not interested in making code easy to read, just in making it work. As I explained above, this is a confused way of thinking, because ill-posed questions and unreadable code make it difficult to impossible to make the code work, or to even understand what making it work would look like.

"Style is irrelevant." – This is by far the most common one. Since coding style, comments, variable names, and even re-factoring code into smaller functions do not affect the output, and thus not the correctness of the program.

"I asked for help with bugs, not style." – This is a variation on the first one. As long as there is no concrete and discrete bug, style feedback and questions for clarification can be discarded.

"This is too much work." – The original poster explains that making the code more readable is too much work for them, and fixing the bugs would be easier for others.

"Nobody will see the code anyway" – Nobody will see the code of the finished product, so it's irrelevant. Sometimes there are variations like "We aren't graded on code quality, only correctness" or "This is for a class project, nobody will depend on the code, so we don't need robustness."

"This is just throwaway code, it doesn't have to be good." – Like the previous one, this is frustrating to read because somebody posted the code on a forum for other people to read and asked them to understand it, and then said he doesn't care if it's readable or debuggable.

"I asked you for help." / "I am asking the questions here." – The original poster refuses to answer questions, because he asked, he expects answers, not questions in return.

"Don't blame me, I didn't write it" – We have completely left the realm of correctness and style now. The poster knows the code is unreadable, or doesn't make sense. He tried to protect his reputation. But he doesn't like the tone of the responses. Its not his fault the code doesn't make sense. It's not his fault if it doesn't work. Common variations are "This must be correct, it was the accepted answer on StackOverflow", or "I copied this from a tutorial", or "Don't blame me, this was written by GitHub Copilot". Often part of the problem is that the code has different parts written in different styles, or uses different data structures in different places, and both parts could benefit from a re-write to make them more consistent with each other. At other times the problem is that the code from the book is "correct" for certain purposes from the book, but not really suited for the problem at hand.

"I apologised already" – The poster is frustrated because he said "I am sorry I am a n00b" or "I am sorry for my bad English" already. Then somebody said his code is unreadable or his prose makes no sense. The poster sees readable code, or at least code that is readable enough to understand what the idea was, as a courtesy, as a social custom, not as something necessary to make the whole question and answer thing work. The same goes for a firm grasp of English. The poster apologised already that his English is bad, and you should just see past it. Dealing with this is especially difficult, because Q&A is framed as some kind of status game, and the poster is trying hard to save face already. Push-back will make him feel like he is losing face, and he will only get more defensive.

Causes

So where does the problem begin? Why do people write unreadable code, post it online, and get defensive? I think the answer is a combination of programming skill, social skill, and simplistic mental models.

Software Engineering is Difficult: Obviously, one root cause is that beginner programmers can't already write readable code from the start. Writing readable, well-factored code that is easy to debug, re-use, and adapt is something that comes with experience. Writing code for other people to read can only be learned after one has learned to write code.

Magical Thinking/Limited Cognitive Empathy: The most common and most direct cause of this phenomenon – the refusal to help others read your unreadable code – is not the unreadable code itself. It is the belief that it should be easy for experienced programmers to understand the structure of and intent behind a piece of code, even if the person who wrote it didn't. If you see software as basically magic, and don't see computers as soulless automatons that do what they do because they are built that way, then this is an easy trap to fall into.

A variant of this works for language. If somebody is bad at English, or bad at the technical jargon needed to ask his question, he will often think that the question he thought up in his native Klingon was perfectly well-formed, and that other people should have no trouble reading his words, because they also think in Klingon, so they would translate it into a question that makes sense anyway.

Status-Consciousness: Many beginner programmers feel the desperate need to distinguish themselves from other beginners, and if they have been learning JavaScript for two months now, they want to be seen as real programmers, not as children who play with Scratch and build Redstone contraptions in MineCraft. They want to be taken seriously. This reminds me of a five year old boy who stretches out his arm and tells me he is THIS BIG, and he is already FIVE, going on SIX, and he will go to SCHOOL soon.

Naive Mental Model of De-Bugging: Every program has a certain number of discrete features bugs, and when you remove all bugs, you end up with a program that works. This is of course nonsense. You can write a program that has an indeterminate number of bugs, or a program that implements an algorithm that doesn't quite work, or a useless program, or a program that does random nonsense.

With any luck, sooner or later, programmers will learn the technical side, and the social and collaborative side of software development.

[lonestarflight]

View of the mating of Little Joe-5B launch vehicle with the Mercury capsule (Mercury Spacecraft No. 14A) at LA-4 in Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Virginia.

Date: April 23, 1961

NASA ID: S61-01673, S61-01663

[clockworkreapers]

Love what you do for my ‘tism, it’s amazing. It is none of my business, but I am so worried about health. Blessings for warding off muscular skeletal diseases 🙏✍️🙏

Fhjskdhdjs dont worry, I swear this is pretty normal for me, I like keeping myself occupied I'm fr used to it. Plus this is legit just the speed I usually make things at. My wrist has yet to really get sore even now, thank you either way thats very kind, ill be alright lol