• andybytes@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    7 hours ago

    I just uh… thought about this a little bit further and I think it’s kind of like a situation between truth and circumstance and shit on top of shit. as well as who does it serve and for what?

      • rtxn@lemmy.world
        381·
        10 days ago

        We need to bring back 2010-2012 rage comic memes. All we needed was a badly cut-out blonde wig to trans Derp’s gender.

      • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        10 days ago

        The moon landing by hand wouldn’t have been as funny without the over the top body builders first.

      • moomoomoo309@programming.devEnglish
        9·
        9 days ago

        “Creates a whole game in assembly” is probably referring to roller coaster tycoon, which was written by a man. (lots of other games were written in asm, like many NES games, but I’d wager RCT was what they were alluding to)

        • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
          3·
          9 days ago

          That was my immediate thought. There were many that came before RCT, but it has the distinction of being (possibly) one of the last in an industry that had already moved on to higher-level languages to do merely half as much.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        9 days ago

        No, I don’t think so. It’s true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.

        In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today’s programming were from Grace Hopper’s era in the 1950s.

        In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.

        That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.

      • letsgo@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        Depends how far you go back. The top half is pretty representative of the professional dev team I was in in 1992.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
            71·
            10 days ago

            The large initial percentage of female coders was due to computer having been a female job, because secretary was. Their role within companies didn’t change, what changed is that they were using machines to do the computing instead of doing it by hand.

            We’re kinda lucky to have the woke trifecta (Ada, Grace, Alan) (first programmer (woman), inventor of compilers (woman), absolute unit (gay)) to keep the chuds at bay. Even if we weren’t all socially inept nerds (or pretending to be so to bosses) there’s only so much you can do, culturally, if the population is growing exponentially. Uncle Bob (yes I know he’s a chud) did the maths at some point IIRC it was something like the number of programmers doubling every two years. Which also means that at any one point in time roughly 2/3rds of programmers have no idea what they’re doing, which explains the javascript ecosystem.

              • andioop@programming.devEnglish
                1·
                9 days ago

                At first I thought this was the Wicked Witch of the West’s actress and thought she must have been multitalented. Then I looked it up to verify. Nope, same name, different women.

                • merc@sh.itjust.works
                  2·
                  9 days ago

                  If you want famous actresses who contributed to technology, you want Hedy Lamarr:

                  At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers.

  • hope@lemmy.world
    111·
    10 days ago

    I feel very confident in my understanding of random 8 bit CPUs and their support chips, but asking me to center a div is like this xkcd.

      • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
        6·
        10 days ago

        It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).

        That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.

        And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).

        • Ethan@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          9 days ago

          I almost never create a tarball, so I have to look up the syntax for that. Which is as simple as man tar. But as far as extracting it almost couldn’t be easier, tar xf <tarball> and call it a day. Or if you want to list the contents without extracting, tar tf <tarball>. Unless you’re using an ancient version of tar, it will detect and handle whatever compression format you’re using without you having to remember if you need z or J or whatever.

          • The Ramen Dutchman@ttrpg.networkEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            It can be easier if you’re used to the dash before the arguments; it’s optional but you can put them:

            tar -cf   # Compress File
tar -xf   # Xtract File
      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        9 days ago

        One reason is that tar supports both traditional style args “tar tf <filename.tar>” and unix-style args “tar -tf <filename.tar>” but there are subtle differences in how they work.

        • Ethan@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          8 days ago

          Literally the only time I’ve ever run into that is when I was trying to manipulate the path it extracted to. In 99% of cases I’m doing tf, xf, or cf plus flags for the compression type, etc, and those differences are irrelevant.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            8 days ago

            I used something recently where it wasn’t possible to use the traditional-style args. I think it was a “diff”, which meant I needed a “-f”. It wasn’t a big deal, but, occasionally it does happen.

            • Ethan@programming.devEnglish
              2·
              7 days ago

              I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. This thread started because I said I’ve never understood why people talk like tar is some indecipherable black magic. Common tasks are easy and there’s a man page for everything else.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        9 days ago

        I got tired of looking up the options for each possible combination of archiving + compression, so today I have a “magic” bash function that can extract almost any format.

        Then for compressing, I only use zip, which doesn’t need any args other than the archive name and the thing you’re compressing. It needs -r when recursing on dirs, but unlike “eXtract” and “Ze”, that’s a good mnemonic.

  • milkisklim@lemm.ee
    55·
    10 days ago

    Hey now. Searching stack overflow circia 2011 to 2018 was an Art. You had to know enough to find the correct question that wasn’t deleted because a mod thought it was a duplicate of another question

    • kautau@lemmy.world
      16·
      10 days ago

      Also to find the actual correct answer three comments down because the one that was voted highest worked, but was actually a really shit way to do the thing being asked

    • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
      4·
      10 days ago

      After a while you got know which stack overflow questions were a waste of time, and you used that knowledge for years.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      2·
      9 days ago

      Before that you had to hang out on flipside or other gamedev sites and show your worthiness before begging for information.

      I was so proud when they shared the DS hack (basically a homebrew SDK made by trial and error by some people) so that I could make small games on it.

  • excral@feddit.org
    531·
    9 days ago

    My experience is that the programmers from the first row very much still exist. My theory is that the number of programmers from the first row stayed the about same or even increased slightly. There are so many more so called “programmers” overall now, however, that in relation the first row programmers are much rarer now. And to be fair, you don’t need a programmer capable of programming entire games in assembly to center a div.

    • zerofk@lemm.ee
      20·
      9 days ago

      And vice versa, you don’t need to know how to centre a div to create a game in assembler. I’m comfortable using pointers and managing memory, but don’t ask me to do anything with web UI.

      • ByteJunk@lemmy.world
        15·
        9 days ago

        I’m guessing that someone who figured out how to keep a high score box centered on screen using assembly will figure it out to do it with CSS.

        The reverse, not so much…

        • groet@feddit.org
          5·
          9 days ago

          But you dont what the code of the assembly-style centered div in your codebase. Because nobody will be able to read it and understand what it even does. There are abstraction specific ways to solve problems and the right way to do something in assembly is not the right way to do it in CSS.

      • Omgpwnies@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        9 days ago

        This can be generalized to say that programming has become such a diverse profession that you will find experts in one area that know very little about others. There’s simply too many things that are programmed in too many ways for anyone to know it all anymore. Hell, that was the case in the 70’s and 80’s too.

  • arudesalad@sh.itjust.works
    44·
    10 days ago

    One of my favourite game dev stories from the 1980s is the story of Elite. It was a game people thought couldn’t be made. Most devs thought hardware wasn’t powerful enough and publishers thought it wouldn’t be fun enough.

    It was one of the first properly 3D open world video games ever made. I think when it released it sold nearly as many copies as there were home computers that could run it.

    In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

    There’s a fantastic video about it here: https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
      9·
      10 days ago

      the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape

      Holy hell, that is OLD old. We’re talking about the beginnings of digital time here. Had the first web constellations formed yet? How fast did you crank your CPU?

      • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 days ago

        Yeah, I played it a lot, and a similar one called aviator which was a kinda flight sim. There wasn’t really much of an internet back then but stuff was easy to copy on tapes.

    • Redkey@programming.dev
      8·
      9 days ago

      In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.

      Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer’s memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.

    • impedans@lemmy.world
      10·
      9 days ago

      If you define what you mean by centering I’ll give you a straight answer.

      Vertically? Horizontally? Center the text or the entire box? Compared to the viewport, the parent container or the entire page?

      “Centering” isn’t as straight forward as you’d think, and what you actually want usually depends on the situation.

        • impedans@lemmy.world
          4·
          9 days ago

          Yeah that works if you wanna center a box of content it relative to the parent container, either horizontally or vertically. For other situations we’ve got different tools

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        9 days ago

        Fuck it, align=‘center’. That’ll center it horizontally relative to some context and if that’s not good enough then you should have been more precise in your request.

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      9·
      9 days ago

      Depends if you’re centering the div or the things in the div. Which has probably been the main issue since CSS was invented.

    • letsgo@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      9 days ago

      Same way you did it in 2024 but it’s easier because the springgirdles have been replaced with rotated manglebrackets.

    • wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io
      6·
      10 days ago

      Well yea, when you train the entire 2nd generation of coders on a book that is “For dummies” what did you expect?

    • Rin@lemm.ee
      6·
      9 days ago
      .parent {
    display: grid;
    place-items: center;
}

      couldn’t be easier in 2025.

      • PoPoP@lemm.ee
        31·
        9 days ago

        probably a lot less performant than doing it the old fashioned way. sometimes that matters. you should have the non-grid non-flex method half committed to memory. abusing flex or grid to save 2 lines of code is not a great practice, and having only one child element is usually a pretty clear sign that flex/grid is the wrong tool for the job

        at the end of the day though do whatever you want, in fact why not just write a javascript function to recenter it every frame at 60fps cause 99.9% of the software 99.9% of people interact with is pure shit made by developers who don’t care for users who don’t care.

        we live in a slop world, made by and for slop people who love slop. can you tell i’ve been awake for 30 hours? anyways…

  • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
    30·
    9 days ago

    QA: “Yeah, Hi. Can you look at this defect ticket?”

    Reading ticket details…

    Me: “Let me guess. Is [whatshisname] responsible for this?”

    QA: “Yeah.”

    Me: “Get him to fix it.”

    QA: “I tried. Like four times.”

    Me: Sigh “I’ll take care of it.”

    QA: “Thank you!”

  • Lemminary@lemmy.world
    27·
    10 days ago

    Hey buddy, if I fix one bug and cause three more, it’s called job security. Where’s my medal?

  • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
    26·
    10 days ago

    It’s 2025 and I have no idea what the current way to center something is. Then again, my job is that of a backend engineer so it’s rare I’m outputting anything that isn’t a log statement. They can pry tables and center tags from my cold, aging hands.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      9 days ago

      IMO tables should be more used for… tabular data. Shocking, I know, but the amount of websites that try to emulate a table with divs and uls out there is crazy.

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
      51·
      10 days ago

      I swore up & down that I’d learn at least two ways of exiting VIM. I even went through basic training to learn all the shortcuts, but it interfered with my regular workflow, so I dropped it “for a bit”. It’s been a year and I can’t remember a damn thing.

  • boonhet@lemm.ee
    18·
    10 days ago

    The fact that the div center search needs a year on it got me lol

    Loving my nearly frontend free development life. I use Stackoverflow or Google maybe 2-3 times a month these days, not sure if I qualify for the upper row :(