Debian gives you a choice though. If you want stability, install the stable release. If you want newer packages, install the testing release. Just be sure to get security updates from unstable (sid) if you do that.
“stable” in this context means that stuff doesn’t change often. It doesn’t mean “stable” as in reliable / never crashes, although Debian is good at that too.
So what it’s really like is only having to do half the work?
If it’s automating the interesting problem solving side of things and leaving just debugging code that one isn’t familiar with, I really don’t see value to humanity in such use cases. That’s really just making debugging more time consuming and removing the majority of fulfilling work in development (in ways that are likely harder to maintain and may be subject to future legal action for license violations). Better to let it do things that it actually does well and keep engaged programmers.
People who rely on this shit don’t know how to debug anything. They just copy some code, without fully understanding the library or the APIs or the semantics, and then they expect someone else to debug it for them.
We do a lot of real-time control software, and just yesterday we were taking about how the newer folks are really good at using available tools and libraries, but they have less understanding of what’s happening underneath and they have problems when those tools don’t/can’t do what we need.
I see the same thing with our newer folks. (And some older folks too.) and management seems to encourage it. Scary scary stuff. Because when something goes wrong there’s only a couple of people who can really figure it out. If I get hit by a bus or laid off, that’s going to be a big problem for them.
Many, many years ago I used to have two Wyse50 terminals, running split screens each with two parts. I did a lot of support on remote systems (via modem!) and I would have a session on a customer system, source code and running on our test system and internal stuff. I didn’t have space for a third terminal.
At another job I had an office with a “U” shaped desk. I would spread printouts across half the “U” and swivel around between the computer and the printouts.
When I learnt programming (back in early 2000s) the textbook said C is a high level 3rd generation language with 4th gen languages being something higher (I don’t remember what examples were given specifically). This is back when the java applets and action script for flash were the hot things. How I miss the days without the world being cursed by JS.
I would also like to add some of the higher level features available in most assembly languages.
Memory management. You can define variables, for example, a string one containing “Hello, world!” and the compiler will correctly allocate required memory and you don’t need to know its address while writing the code, you just reference the variable.
Code labels. If you want to do a conditional or unconditional jump, you need to know the address of the code you want to reach. But, obviously, every change you make to your code base will change the memory layout of your binary. Asembly provides code labels. You can think of them like function names.
Assembly allows you to reference 3rd party libraries without knowing exact function entry addresses. You just use function names like you would with C or any other language.
Modern assembly languages have even more higher level features, like macros support. And some are even hardware agnostic, like intermediate representation assembly language used in LLVM.
When the gp’s book says that C is a third generation language: I would guess the first generation is Fortran and the second generation contains ALGOL and BCPL. C was heavily influenced by BCPL. (get it? C comes after B)
FTP isn’t really used much any more. SFTP (file transfers over SSH) mostly took over, and people that want to sync a whole directory to the server usually use rsync these days.
Isn’t Cyberduck a paid program though? I remember trying it, but I can’t remember why I went back to filezilla. I thought it was because my trial for Cyberduck expired.
programmer_humor
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