React definition: React (also known as React.js or ReactJS) is a free and open-source front-end JavaScript library for building user interfaces based on components.
Tbf, “learned a language” is a hard thing to pin down in any case.
I’ve been building enterprise software with python for almost a decade now. I still occasionally find stuff in the stdlibs that I didn’t know about, or even sometimes some subtle feature of the language that I never had reason to explore until now.
If someone asks me if I “learned” python, id say hell yeah - but there’s always still plenty to learn
That being said, no reasonable definition of learned includes what you could do in 2 days, even as an experienced dev lol
To be fair, i did cover the Fortran 95 spec in a weekend, but i was motivated to tutor aerospace engineerings as there were far more females there than in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
The point is that learning a spec is not learning how to program in the language, just as learning how a violin works is not learning to play the violin. And writing your first few programs is like learning to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Happy Farmer on the violin. You’ve kind of learned the violin, but you’re not getting into any professional orchestras.
It’ basically the Dunning-Krugger curve - you’re well enough into the last part of it so you are well aware of how much there is to learn about it and how you will never know all of it, thus you don’t have and never will have the same kind of cocksure belief that “I know this shit” as somebody who knows just a bit but not yet enough to understand how much there is to know.
Something like 20 years ago, I learned PHP in 2 days… meaning, I could write better PHP than anyone else on the team.
(not to diss on the team, one was a Java guy who left shortly afterwards, the others were a couple interns, while I had the power of something like 10 years of coding experience… and a PHP cheatsheet-booklet)
That sounds less like you learned the language to a high standard, and more that you were already a good programmer in general terms and everyone else on your team barely knew what they were doing.
Ultimately if you can write good code in one language, you can probably also do it in another (especially with access to cheat sheets), but I still wouldn’t call using a cheat sheet having “learned” a language.
Of course it’s all relative and subjective - which is the whole point , one person may consider just being able to write syntactically correct statements as having “learned” a language. Where others might expect a deep knowledge of the language features, standard libraries, and best design practices (this is the side that I personally lean, which I maintain can’t be done in 2 days)
I once wrote an interpreter for a subset of the java bytecode in python. The jvm being a stack machine allowed me to store its state in IPFS and reference past states by their hash, i.e. you get a blockchain of execution states. It worked for a hello world program and was slow as fuck.
In my experience, you can’t expect it to deliver great working code, but it can always point you in the right direction.
There were some situations in which I just had no idea on how to do something, and it pointed me to the right library. The code itself was flawed, but with this information, I could use the library documentation and get it to work.
ChatGPT has been spot on for my DDLs. I was working on a personal project and was feeling really lazy about setting up a postgres schema. I said I wanted a postgres DDL and just described the application in detail and it responded with pretty much what I would have done (maybe better) with perfect relationships between tables and solid naming conventions with very little work for me to do on it. I love it for more boilerplate stuff or sorta like you said just getting me going. Super complicated code usually doesn’t work perfectly but I always use it for my DDLs now and similar now.
The real problem is when people don’t realize something is wrong and then get frustrated by the bugs. Though I guess that’s a great learning opportunity on its own.
I’m going to ask ChatGPT how to prepare a garotte and then I am going to strangle you with it, and you will simply have to pray that I roll the 10% chance that it freaks out and tells me that a garotte should consist entirely of paper mache and malice.
Had that happen at work. I just drag-and-dropped a file into the Outlook web-UI, thinking it’d attach as an e-mail. Turns out, they recently changed that feature and you now have to drop into the right half of the area. If you drop into the left half, it uploads into OneDrive.
I accidentally did that. The document had personal data inside. That’s a breach of GDPR. Fucking ace.
(I’m not sure that attaching to the e-mail isn’t also a breach of the GDPR, since my company switched Microsoft 365 for various things. But yeah, I certainly would have liked a confirmation dialog.)
Maybe next year Xbox cloud gaming should team up with Outlook and Onedrive for the “Ultimate” cloud computing conversion feature:
When you drag and drop a file into Outlook, Windows mail, or Exchange, the file bounces around like in the window like in the game Breakout. You can only attach a copy if you hit every word in your email message. If you let the file fall past the signature line, it makes a Onedrive link automatically.
My favorite Windows drag-and-drop feature is that if ever I drag a file over the left pane of Explorer on its way to another window, the whole thing freezes up for a minute or so. I think it’s polling all the network drives just in case I might decide to drop it there, and since my NAS is turned off (it broke) it just waits until the connection times out. Of course in traditional Microsoft style this locks up the UI thread. I have to remember to drag everything off to the right and then go around.
Software devs in general seem to have a hard time with balance. No comments or too many comments. Not enough abstraction or too much, overly rigid or loose coding standards, overoptimizing or underoptimizing. To be fair it is difficult to get there.
“please use our spyware so we can syphon more of your personal info to get more quarterly profit… We are begging you. See how many apps we have for mail?”
The thing is that in French, Spanish, etc. it still makes sense if you put the adjective before the noun, even if it might sound weird in some cases. An adjective is an adjective and a noun is a noun.
But English is positional. Where you put a word gives it its function. So “red car” and “car red” mean different things.
That’s because they are romance languages. They come from Latin where word order is irrelevant as each “word” has a different form for the specific use.
Yes, that’s what I said. My native language is a romance language too. And after speaking it her whole life, my wife has trouble getting the grasp of how in English swapping two words completely changes the meaning of what she’s saying (especially when it’s two nouns, like e.g. “parent council”)
The quickest way to get a team of 10 contractors to turn 100 lines of basic code from a decent engineer into 2k, with 50 janky vulnerable dependencies, that needs to be babied with customized ide’s and multi-minute+ build times and 60m long recorded meetings.
Sure… That"s what libraries are for. No one hand-rolls that stuff. You can do all of that just fine (and, actually, in a lot less code, mostly because Java is so fucking verbose) without using the nightmare that is Spring.
Actually, there’s a lot to be said for being able to configure your spleamtomoter without needing to reverse the polarity on the stack cache rotator arm.
programmer_humor
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.