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I can’t remember some syntax unless I do it at least 100 times. I often look up stuff that I have already done before and know because of my goldfish memory.
The missing middle section was documentation and QA getting worse
Well yea, when you train the entire 2nd generation of coders on a book that is “For dummies” what did you expect?
Love the shoutout to Margaret Hamilton
The majority of “programmers in the past” should be women actually, but our meme formats are still too patriarchal to express that in 2025.
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.
The glory days of Derp and Derpina
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.
Depends how far you go back. The top half is pretty representative of the professional dev team I was in in 1992.
Obligatory Grace Hopper
“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)
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.
The moon landing by hand wouldn’t have been as funny without the over the top body builders first.
“too patriarchal” no one was thinking of “furthering the goals of the patriarchy” or whatever your delusions tell you.
It’s just people making memes, and most people who make memes who are guys will make memes with guys in them, because they identify with them the most.
Your brain dead take is pure cancer.
Dude. Chill. Ain’t nobody giving a shit about your take on someone else’s take.
I agree with you: I never intended to imply explicit anti-diversity intentions or even awareness of the biases embedded in our culture.
Implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. Implicit biases are activated involuntarily, unconsciously, and without one’s awareness or intentional control (see, e.g., Greenwald & Krieger, 2006; Kang, et al., 2012; Nier, 2005; Rudman, 2004a)
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.
You can throw Margaret Hamilton in there, who was in charge of the software team that landed people on the moon. The picture of her standing next to a printout of the Apollo guidance software is iconic.
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.
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.
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
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
I often found the correct answers in the comments of an answer
Still do.
After a while you got know which stack overflow questions were a waste of time, and you used that knowledge for years.
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.
I’m 2 from the top, 3 from the bottom.
my friend there are only 2 rows
I read that as he created a game in assembly, and can’t quit vim. Whether technically or sexually is up to OP to say. And what’s the game?
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 :(
Yeah OK, but back then, an office suite was like 500 LOC.
People have been hm unable to quit vim since before I was born.
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.
Some say they are still trapped there, to this day…
May the :helpgrep be ever on their side
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.
tar --help
(joke)
YOU FOOL! THE ACTUAL COMMAND WAStar -?That dash looks an awful lot like an em-dash
Normal:
-Em:
–
I’ve never understood why people are so intimidated by tar
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-rwhen recursing on dirs, but unlike “eXtract” and “Ze”, that’s a good mnemonic.tar -eXtract Ze Vucking File
Thanks! This will definitely help me to remember it from now on.
Me 6 months from now:
tar -EZVF
Me in 6 months "
how to install winzip using terminal"
Nobody wants to deliberately use the wrong compression type when extracting, so modern tar will figure out the compression itself if you just point it at a file. So
tar -xf filenameworks on almost anything. You don’t need to remember which flag to use on a.tar.bz2file and which one for a.tar.xzfile.That doesn’t give me a memorable mnemonic though.
tar -eXtract File
yeah, but then how am I supposed to remember “tar” ? :P
Tape ARchive -eXtract File
It is sticky and pretty much ruins clothes.
The
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 needzorJor whatever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel attacked by “how to center div 2025”
.parent { display: grid; place-items: center; }couldn’t be easier in 2025.
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…
Super easy!
<center> <div> </div> </center>
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.
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 anduls out there is crazy.
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
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?
You couldn’t crank your CPU in the olden days, it’d make games run in fast forward.
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.
Elite Dangerous is the most recent installment of the series started by that game
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.
I once had an intern attempt to install sudo using NPM and when that didn’t work he asked ChatGPT “Why can’t I install sudo from NPM?” while I’m trying to explain it to him.
He was smart, but somehow knew very little about commercial computers despite being on the verge of getting his master’s in computer science.
“Wait why can’t I install windows iso from vscode extension store?”
Hey buddy, if I fix one bug and cause three more, it’s called job security. Where’s my medal?
I have to say, I’m pretty sure those guys were in the past too.
Getting to keep your job is your medal then.
80s programmers hated Unix, btw. Look up Unix Haters Handbook, it’s a free and funny read
A lot of it was fair criticism at the time. Linux fixed some of what was wrong. Having a good
sudoconfig mostly resolves the problem of having one superuser account, and big, multiuser systems are a lot less common now, anyway. X’s network transparency features aren’t that useful in modern computing contexts, either, though I have found a few over the years.But mostly, it’s because the landscape changed from a hundred Unix vendors vs a bunch of other OSen, to now where it’s Windows vs Linux vs OSX. By that comparison, the two with Unix-derived history look well thought out.
(This also implies that NextStep was the one old Unix vendor that has survived in a meaningful way. I don’t think anyone would have guessed that 30 years ago.)
I prefer the MIT link, it’s faster 😁
Unix does so many stupid things and we’re still stuck with some of them. Especially the terminal section still applies today.
Good thing GNU’s not Unix
They also hated their local sysadmin. BOFH still holds up in a few key ways.
Thanks. I didn’t know there was a real band called “The Pipi Pickers” and I might have lived on happily without that knowledge.
Unix Haters Handbook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook
Didn’t knew this. It has 360 pages, wow!
EDIT:
The Macintosh on which I type this has 64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM?
hehe
