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I’ve tried this a few times. I don’t think it works.
Basically the way you want to explain a piece of reasoning , and the order in which things need to be defined for a program, are different. You end up either making the document match the code structures, or the code structure match the document. Both are bad.
You need to meet it’s bigger brother, the swan.
Where I live we get white swans, Canadian geese, and Egyptian geese. Egyptian are smaller and absolutely fine. Canadian will get angry and tell you to fuck off Swans are 50% bigger and will run you out of the county.
Not some people.
At university I had an introductory C course where one assignment was to write a program that searched a 4x4 array of booleans for groups of cells set to true. Groups had to be rectangles, powers of 2 in width and height, and could wrap (i.e. they could go off the right edge and back on the left edge). We had to submit our programs by e-mail and printed form one week later. The prof. marked the paper versions and the TA ran and tested the digital. One slight problem, if you used the university owned printers, they charged for print outs. A few pence per page to cover costs and stop people abusing the rather nice high quality printers the computer faculty had.
I’d always enjoyed programming and whilst C was new to me, using another language wasn’t a big problem. As I worked on it I realised the problem wasn’t as straightforward as I first thought, but I spent a few hours on it that evening and had a solution I was happy with.
Penny was a student on the course whose approach to academia was memorization. She didn’t consume, process, and apply concepts. She just remembered them. Her favourite subject was maths. While the rest of us were struggling to derive some formula, she’d have just committed the process to memory.
Penny was complaining a lot on this programming assignment. She didn’t understand why the assignment was so hard for an introductory class. I didn’t judge. I know some people find programming hard, but I didn’t feel I could help her much without jeopardising my own mark. There’s only so much uniqueness in a small program and if she just copied my solution we’d both get penalised for plagiarism. I did mention to her the cases I’d found tricky to get right was when two groups overlapped. If one group completely covered a smaller one you’d only report the bigger one, but if not you’d report both groups.
I heard, through her boyfriend, that that week had involved many long evenings working on this assignment, but she turned up at the next class solution in hand. Obviously stressed, she carried a pile of paper of several hundred pages. She had written a program that consisted of an if-statement for every possible group size and location. About a hundred different possible groups. Each condition written with constant value indices into the array. To cope with the overlapping groups problem, checks for smaller groups also checked that no larger group also covered this area. No loops. No search algorithm. Just a linear program of if-statements.
Apparently debugging this has been a nightmare. Cut and paste errors everywhere, but when I’d told her about overlapping groups aspect it had blown her mind. There always seemed to be a combination she hadn’t accounted for. Multiple times she thought she was done, only to find a corner case she’d missed. And just to kick her when she was down, she’d paid for multiple printouts, each one costing about £10 only to find a problem afterwards.
This consistent A grade student who sailed through everything by relying on her memory had been broken by being asked to create an algorithm rather than remember one. She got credit for submitting a solution that compiled and solved some cases, but I doubt the professor got past the first page of that huge printout.
Penny had worked really hard for that D.
So much Python criticism comes from people who don’t know the language.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Programmer Humor@programming.dev•Interviews as seen by HR and the candidateEnglish1101·1 month agoI’ve never understood why the HR people always see “not asking questions about the company” or “not demonstrating knowledge about the company” as such a red flag.
People are looking for a job, not a cult to join.
Javis, his AI assistant, did all the work.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Programmer Humor@programming.dev•It's those damn coding gremlins I tell yaEnglish12·2 months agoRight side looks pretty good to me.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Programming@programming.dev•Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, 2eEnglish2·2 months agoLikewise, but I watched the lecture videos rather than reading the book. Allowed me to decompose problems in an entirely different way.
My heart stops after every beat. Fortunately it has always started again before the next one…so far.
Fine, but I hope you’re taking a few seconds to understand why the error message you received came from the the syntactic mistake you fixed.
A single Vs double quote mistake should be 5 seconds from error message to fix, with a thought process like:
- “Unable” is illegal key-word on line 163
- Go to line 163 - “Unable” is the first word of a string…oh the previous string must not be closed correctly.
- Find previous string on line 154. There it is - the wrong quote mark.
If you don’t learn what the error message is telling you, you will be forever doomed take time to cut’n’paste code into an LLM. It might save you time today because that thought process takes you 2 mins not 5 seconds, but that’s not the level you want to stay at.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Programming@programming.dev•Why care about the no-JS experience?English22·2 months agoThey overlap. Js is a shit technology for the blind.
Dynamic sites that move / hide / unhide components as you do things are unhelpful and confusing. A screen reader will tell you what’s under the cursor right now. If that changes, you don’t get notified that you’re now pointing at something else.
Static sites are better for accessibility too.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Technology@lemmy.ml•‘No quick wins’: China has the world’s first operational thorium nuclear reactorEnglish4·3 months agoThey maintained it, but I think it was energy negative.
I ask them how they’d do the job we’re recruiting for, on a simplified example project.
One this morning admitted she had the wrong preconceptions about the role, but understood exactly why we were asking what we were asking.
I call that success.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Programmer Humor@programming.dev•muskrat's data eng expert's hard drive overheats while processing 60k rowsEnglish232·4 months agoDoesn’t actually say that 60k overheated his drive. He says that he ran a run on 60k, and that he couldn’t do the whole database due to overheating. Two unrelated statements except that 60k is the lower bound for what he could process.
Doesn’t mean he knows what he’s doing though, as pretty huge datasets are processable on quite modest hardware if you do it right.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Programming@programming.dev•The power of interning: making a time series database 2000x smaller in RustEnglish1·4 months agoOf course compressing isn’t a good solution for this stuff. The point of the comment was to say how unremarkable the original claim was.
wewbull@feddit.ukto Programming@programming.dev•The power of interning: making a time series database 2000x smaller in RustEnglish1·4 months agoIt all depends on the data entropy. Formats like JSON compress very well anyway. If the data is also very repetitive too then 2000x is very possible.
A better way to say that (more accurate) is that abusers often learnt “how” through personal experience.
The key point is not to look at someone who has been abused and think that they are likely going to become an abuser.