• gradual@lemmings.world
    205·
    11 days ago

    Honestly, CSS is a fucking joke and it’s solely to blame for why centering something isn’t always straightforward.

    By the way, this picture is a crock of shit for people who aren’t programmers. Anyone who is a programmer will not take it seriously because programming is so much more about helping others instead of shaming them.

    • SirQuack@feddit.nl
      6·
      10 days ago

      Stackoverflow: exists solely from the urge of developers to help developers, and since ExpertsExchange was paid dogshit.
      This meme: pisses on its whole purpose.

      • rooroo@feddit.org
        1·
        9 days ago

        Everybody complaining about css like “but it doesn’t do what I want if to do without me investing a minute into why”.

        Ironically, it’s oh so often the RTFM crowd.

  • lobut@lemmy.ca
    11·
    11 days ago

    I started with C++ and went to Java to .NET to Javascript and now to Terraform.

    I know this is all a joke but there’s something definitely different with the ones above and the ones below. There’s a bit of satisfaction you can get sometimes when you’re working with memory directly and getting faster feedback (yes, there’s more math back then and it wasn’t easy to look stuff up, for sure). However, there’s new challenges nowadays … there’s so many layers on top of layers. I feel as though Stack Overflow and ChatGPT are so needed because the error messages and things we give are obfuscated or unclear (not always any library author’s fault as there’s compatibility issues, etc)

    We’re doing serverless stuff at my current company and none of our devs run code locally. They have to upload it using CDK or Serverless Framework to run on the cloud. We don’t use SST so we can’t set breakpoints but like that’s a lot of crap inbetween just running your code already. Not even getting into the libraries and transpilers and stuff we use. I spent like a few weeks over Christmas to get our devs to run the code locally. Guess what? None of them use it because they’re so use to uploading it. I was like, "you can put breakpoints in it! you can have nodemon and it instant reloads! nope, none of them care … "

      • andioop@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        11 days ago

        First learning is last learning.

        I’ll be the dumb one to ask: what do you mean? Is this that making a mistake that costs a lot is the best teacher, because you only have to mess it up once to learn it forever?

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          11 days ago

          It’s a mantra about teaching people and then expecting them to forget it. Doesn’t work. They’ll default to what they already know.

          My freshman English teacher got married in October and I called her by her maiden name the entire year.

          Like all programming mantras, it’s not universally true, but it’s annoyingly reliable. It reflects the shape of the human brain.

        • Arcane2077@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          5·
          11 days ago

          Pretty sure they mean people don’t learn something again when they already learned it. Once you learn how to do something, willingness to learn it again but a different way dries up, and so you stick to bad habits as long as they ‘work’

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
      51·
      12 days ago

      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.

  • hope@lemmy.world
    128·
    12 days ago

    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.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        11 days ago

        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.

        • Ethan@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          10 days ago

          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.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            10 days ago

            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.

            • Ethan@programming.devEnglish
              2·
              9 days ago

              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.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        12 days ago

        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 -r when recursing on dirs, but unlike “eXtract” and “Ze”, that’s a good mnemonic.

      • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
        7·
        12 days ago

        It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).

        That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.

        And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).

        • Ethan@programming.devEnglish
          2·
          12 days ago

          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 need z or J or whatever.

          • The Ramen Dutchman@ttrpg.networkEnglish
            1·
            5 days ago

            It can be easier if you’re used to the dash before the arguments; it’s optional but you can put them:

            tar -cf   # Compress File
tar -xf   # Xtract File
    • Rin@lemm.ee
      8·
      12 days ago
      .parent {
    display: grid;
    place-items: center;
}

      couldn’t be easier in 2025.

      • PoPoP@lemm.ee
        31·
        11 days ago

        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…

  • excral@feddit.org
    621·
    11 days ago

    My experience is that the programmers from the first row very much still exist. My theory is that the number of programmers from the first row stayed the about same or even increased slightly. There are so many more so called “programmers” overall now, however, that in relation the first row programmers are much rarer now. And to be fair, you don’t need a programmer capable of programming entire games in assembly to center a div.

    • zerofk@lemm.ee
      27·
      11 days ago

      And vice versa, you don’t need to know how to centre a div to create a game in assembler. I’m comfortable using pointers and managing memory, but don’t ask me to do anything with web UI.

      • Omgpwnies@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        11 days ago

        This can be generalized to say that programming has become such a diverse profession that you will find experts in one area that know very little about others. There’s simply too many things that are programmed in too many ways for anyone to know it all anymore. Hell, that was the case in the 70’s and 80’s too.

      • ByteJunk@lemmy.world
        16·
        11 days ago

        I’m guessing that someone who figured out how to keep a high score box centered on screen using assembly will figure it out to do it with CSS.

        The reverse, not so much…

        • groet@feddit.org
          6·
          11 days ago

          But you dont what the code of the assembly-style centered div in your codebase. Because nobody will be able to read it and understand what it even does. There are abstraction specific ways to solve problems and the right way to do something in assembly is not the right way to do it in CSS.

          • Estradiol Enjoyer @lemmy.blahaj.zone
            7·
            11 days ago

            Agreed, in my limited experience with both CSS is like the conceptual opposite of assembly. When I do web design I tell it what I want to look like but can’t see how it’s getting there because that’s done for me. Assembly is the lowest level of abstraction we’ve got and it took me ages to write a little program for class that returns an argument in it (Jasmin VM) and then get GCC to compile it.

            I would say that CSS is like doing an incantation that magically makes the site look good if you do it right, and assembly is like building something by hand.

  • andybytes@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    I just uh… thought about this a little bit further and I think it’s kind of like a situation between truth and circumstance and shit on top of shit. as well as who does it serve and for what?

  • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
    35·
    12 days ago

    QA: “Yeah, Hi. Can you look at this defect ticket?”

    Reading ticket details…

    Me: “Let me guess. Is [whatshisname] responsible for this?”

    QA: “Yeah.”

    Me: “Get him to fix it.”

    QA: “I tried. Like four times.”

    Me: Sigh “I’ll take care of it.”

    QA: “Thank you!”

  • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
    30·
    12 days ago

    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.

  • milkisklim@lemm.ee
    65·
    12 days ago

    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

    • kautau@lemmy.world
      21·
      12 days ago

      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

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 days ago

      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.

    • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
      5·
      12 days ago

      After a while you got know which stack overflow questions were a waste of time, and you used that knowledge for years.

    • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      5·
      11 days ago

      I first tried vi in the early 90s, before I had easy access to online resources. I had to open a new shell and kill the vi process to exit it. Next time I dialed into my usual BBS I asked how to exit that thing. But since then I’ve liked it, because vi has been on every system I ever ssh’ed into.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
        2·
        11 days ago

        You quit it just like you quit ed or ex, just that you have to enter the prompt (:) yourself as vi is not by default in prompt mode. And you should know ed, ed is the standard editor.

        I use Helix btw.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
      81·
      11 days ago

      I can exit Vim, it just feels like trying to rip out the dashboard and the interiors from a family car because race cars also lack them. Kate is a good speedy alternative to VSCode, not to mention it also does not have Microsoft’s greedy hands on it.

        • toddestan@lemm.ee
          1·
          11 days ago

          Out of the box, Vim’s default configuration is very basic as it’s trying to emulate vi as close as possible. It like if you want things like headlights or a heater or a tachometer in your family car, you got to create a vimrc and turn those features on. That was my experience when I first started using Vim - I spent a lot of time messing around creating a vimrc until I got things the way I wanted.

          One of the big changes with Neovim is their default settings are a lot more like what you would expect in a modern text editor.

    • frezik@midwest.social
      2·
      10 days ago

      A lot of it was fair criticism at the time. Linux fixed some of what was wrong. Having a good sudo config 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.)

    • exu@feditown.comEnglish
      53·
      12 days ago

      Unix does so many stupid things and we’re still stuck with some of them. Especially the terminal section still applies today.

      • Prime_Minister_Keyes@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        11 days ago

        Thanks. I didn’t know there was a real band called “The Pipi Pickers” and I might have lived on happily without that knowledge.