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ProfessorTomoe

Story Wednesday August 16th, 2017

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On 8/21/2017 at 11:03 AM, Cpt. Obvious said:

Personally I feel you shouldn't spend more time learning to use the editor than programming...

Sometimes there isn't much difference.

When training in using the editor on the mainframe at one employer (this was back in the days of mainframes with dumb text-only terminals), I read the manual and skipped class for an afternoon to write Conway's Life in editor macros. In the process recasting the counting as string manipulation, and array subscripts as line numbers.

Some years later, with me at the same employer, a problem developed with a special-purpose niche inventory system in another department... and it turned out that the system, written by a summer intern a few years earlier, consisted entirely of editor macros. It took them a couple weeks to get sufficiently desperate that my department got word of it, and (since I was known to have done some valuable and complex things with editor macros) they asked me if I thought I could fix it. Of course I was willing to at least take a look... and it took me about two days to figure out what had gone wrong* and another three days to go through the whole system and fix it.

 

* What had gone wrong: a new version of the editor was only 99.99% backward-compatible. Specifically, when doing full-screen interaction, what the computer got *back* from the terminal included "field codes" which in the old version marked places where terminal behavior changed - e.g. between protected and unprotected areas - and in the new version not only marked those places but gave full specification of the new behavior, taking three bytes instead of just one.

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1 hour ago, Scotty said:
3 hours ago, Drasvin said:

I know it says the learning curve of popular MMOs, but I wonder how Dwarf Fortress matches up.

As far as I can remember, the curve is fairly gentle upwards, but then goes worse than EVE's after the first cat death.

Dwarf Fortress's learning cliff curve is fairly sharp at the start. For one, it's confusing for players that haven't played an old-fashioned ASCII game, unless the player happens to be using a tileset, which typically requires either digging around for one of the starter pack, or finding a tileset and putting it into the game manually. For two, the UI is very user-unfriendly, with information spread out across multiple screens with little in-game indication on how to get information and things you need to do stuff that needs done. Dorf Fort really could do with a UI overhaul and a tutorial.

32 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

* What had gone wrong: a new version of the editor was only 99.99% backward-compatible. Specifically, when doing full-screen interaction, what the computer got *back* from the terminal included "field codes" which in the old version marked places where terminal behavior changed - e.g. between protected and unprotected areas - and in the new version not only marked those places but gave full specification of the new behavior, taking three bytes instead of just one.

This is why programmers should test things extensively in a development environment before upgrading the live environment. Make sure the upgrades aren't going to break anything, and fix what is going to break, before it affects the system/business as a whole.

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11 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Oh, joy, Yet another variation on Lisp. Beloved of set theory geeks, Lisp is a higher-level computer language that has the dubious distinction of being harder to master than writing assembly code. I suffered through the summer of 1995 at UC Berkeley being tortured by another Lips variation, Sceme--on computers using Gnu. I haven't touched any Lisp clone since. Oh, once you pass that introductory course, you never use scheme again at UC Berkeley; all the other Computer Science courses use C++.

I'm pretty sure Haskell or Prolog are WORSE.

Lisp in fact brought lot of elements which become very useful additions to popular languages like Javascript, Python, Ruby, recently even PHP: garbage collector, dynamic typing, higher-order functions (and anonymous functions and closures) ...

Of course, it made very hard to USE those elements by being strictly functional, using prefix notation or the gigantic amount of parentheses.

1 hour ago, Drasvin said:
2 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

* What had gone wrong: a new version of the editor was only 99.99% backward-compatible. Specifically, when doing full-screen interaction, what the computer got *back* from the terminal included "field codes" which in the old version marked places where terminal behavior changed - e.g. between protected and unprotected areas - and in the new version not only marked those places but gave full specification of the new behavior, taking three bytes instead of just one.

This is why programmers should test things extensively in a development environment before upgrading the live environment. Make sure the upgrades aren't going to break anything, and fix what is going to break, before it affects the system/business as a whole.

The author of EDITOR had no idea things like that inventory systems exists and didn't worked for mentioned company. The programmer who created the inventory system no longer worked at the company. Someone else did the editor upgrade, or maybe it upgraded automatically.

(At least that's how I understood what Don Edwards said)

 

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5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I'm pretty sure Haskell or Prolog are WORSE.

Lisp in fact brought lot of elements which become very useful additions to popular languages like Javascript, Python, Ruby, recently even PHP: garbage collector, dynamic typing, higher-order functions (and anonymous functions and closures) ...

Of course, it made very hard to USE those elements by being strictly functional, using prefix notation or the gigantic amount of parentheses.

The author of EDITOR had no idea things like that inventory systems exists and didn't worked for mentioned company. The programmer who created the inventory system no longer worked at the company. Someone else did the editor upgrade, or maybe it upgraded automatically.

(At least that's how I understood what Don Edwards said)

The Moderator: Errr, while I appreciate computer geekiness, by now this is so far off topic that maybe you could continue this in a new thread in the Off Topic forum? :icon_eek:

~tOH.

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