• gradual@lemmings.world
    184·
    1 day 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
      5·
      9 hours 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.

    • SirQuack@feddit.nl
      21·
      9 hours ago

      I’m thankful for AI. It guarantees my job as developer will continue to exist to repair all future AI-damage.

  • lobut@lemmy.ca
    11·
    1 day 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·
        1 day 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?

        • Arcane2077@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          5·
          1 day 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’

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          1 day 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.

    • letsgo@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      Same way you did it in 2024 but it’s easier because the springgirdles have been replaced with rotated manglebrackets.

    • Rose@slrpnk.net
      16·
      1 day ago

      If using plain CSS, usually it’s enough to set width appropriately, and margin-left and margin-right to auto.

      If using a Modern Frontend/CSS Framework, then may God have mercy on your poor soul.

      (Seriously I just started a new project with TailwindCSS and I’m so confused. But not entirely desperate yet.)

        • Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          16·
          1 day ago

          If you spend a lot of time on a single framework, you will transcend and become a sort of frontend diety, growing multiple extra limbs allowing you to type in CSS classes faster than any mere mortal

            • gradual@lemmings.world
              22·
              1 day ago

              What’s sad is that web development is only a nightmare so websites can be worse.

              I genuinely believe it’s part of the concerted effort by the cabal to make us accept a ‘new normal.’

              They don’t want an environment where anyone feels like they can make a website. They want us to believe we need to spend years studying before we can do anything, and even then we can only do what our bosses tell us to.

        • toddestan@lemm.ee
          5·
          1 day ago

          Generally I find many these frameworks will make some complicated things simple, but the cost is some things that were once simple are now complicated. They can be great if you just need the things they simplify - or in other words can stick to what they were intended for, but my favorite way of keeping things simple is to avoid using complicated and heavy frameworks.

        • gradual@lemmings.world
          11·
          1 day ago

          I think they exist because of ignorance.

          People who don’t understand how to do a task will usually choose the wrong tools for that task.

          If someone is trying to cover up their lack of knowledge, they will usually make things more complicated than they need to be.

      • loics2@lemm.ee
        3·
        1 day ago

        w-... mx-auto, replace the 3 dots with your desired width value, and that’s it with tailwind

      • Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        I’m doing a small hobby project (a ladder/ranking system for playing beer sports with my community), and I tried out Tailwind.

        I gave up and loaded Bootstrap instead, but I will probably end up just writing all the CSS myself.

        Seems so silly to have 15 CSS classes on a single DOM element…

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
          1·
          11 hours ago

          Why is that silly? As long as the classes follow a strict naming scheme & have useful abstractions, that seems much better than having to give every node a unique class name that doesn’t necessarily have much meaning. I can’t count the number of “container” and “wrapper” and “content” classes I’ve seen & written, where the names don’t describe anything useful.

          • gradual@lemmings.world
            11·
            1 day ago

            Shouldn’t they be designed in an intuitive manner that makes misuse more difficult than regular use?

            Otherwise, why even bother using them? It’s like now you need to know all the ins and outs of CSS and a trendy framework that will lock you into their ecosystem.

            • Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              2·
              1 day ago

              Kidding aside, I think the popular frameworks these days are incredibly well made. Frontend web has always been hell, and if your job is producing functional web GUIs, you can’t do it on a large scale without them.

              • gradual@lemmings.world
                11·
                1 day ago

                Based on my own experience developing GUIs, I’ve reached the conclusion that creating them through code is obsolete.

                We should be focusing on developing GUIs to develop GUIs, like Godot, instead of ‘frameworks’ that make an obsolete method of doing things even more cumbersome and complex.

            • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              1·
              1 day ago

              Well, I find bootstrap very intuitive, and I don’t have 15 classes on my elements. That’s why I was asking.

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      Depends if you’re centering the div or the things in the div. Which has probably been the main issue since CSS was invented.

    • impedans@lemmy.world
      10·
      2 days ago

      If you define what you mean by centering I’ll give you a straight answer.

      Vertically? Horizontally? Center the text or the entire box? Compared to the viewport, the parent container or the entire page?

      “Centering” isn’t as straight forward as you’d think, and what you actually want usually depends on the situation.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Fuck it, align=‘center’. That’ll center it horizontally relative to some context and if that’s not good enough then you should have been more precise in your request.

        • impedans@lemmy.world
          4·
          2 days ago

          Yeah that works if you wanna center a box of content it relative to the parent container, either horizontally or vertically. For other situations we’ve got different tools

  • excral@feddit.org
    61·
    2 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
      26·
      2 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·
        1 day 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·
        2 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·
          2 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·
            2 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.

      • moomoomoo309@programming.devEnglish
        10·
        1 day ago

        “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)

        • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 day ago

          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.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        1 day ago

        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.

      • letsgo@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Depends how far you go back. The top half is pretty representative of the professional dev team I was in in 1992.

      • rtxn@lemmy.world
        441·
        2 days ago

        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.

      • raman_klogius@ani.socialEnglish
        141·
        2 days ago

        So were “computers”. It used to be a job, delegated mostly to women. The JD is doing calculations day in and day out.

      • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        2 days ago

        The moon landing by hand wouldn’t have been as funny without the over the top body builders first.

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
            81·
            2 days ago

            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.

              • andioop@programming.devEnglish
                1·
                1 day ago

                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.

                • merc@sh.itjust.works
                  3·
                  22 hours ago

                  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.

  • RogueBanana@lemmy.zipEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    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.

  • hope@lemmy.world
    128·
    2 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·
        1 day 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·
          14 hours 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·
            13 hours 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.

      • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website
        6·
        2 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·
          2 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.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 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.

    • bisby@lemmy.worldEnglish
      68·
      2 days ago

      Nano… Like… The one that has all the keybinds permanently shown at the bottom of the screen?

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 day ago

      Huh? Isn’t it like right there at the bottom of the screen?

      I guess not knowing that ^X means Control+X could be the issue, but still…

      • andioop@programming.devEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        TIL!

        Can exit nano on my own, have the common sense to not call in a panic about it before at least looking it up. (Which is how I learned how to exit it: looking it up.) But was never taught about ^ meaning “Control+” until your comment, especially since nowadays people write it out as “Control+” or “CTRL+”.

        I might have put two and two together when dealing with everything else in nano after I learned to exit, but never really internalized the rule “^ means Control+”. So thank you for your comment!

        Disclaimer: I feel like I am too stupid for most of programming.dev but participate here anyways because I learn stuff from the comments.

        • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
          3·
          23 hours ago

          Don’t feel stupid. It’s bad enough that all of IT is one giant impostor-syndrome support group. There’s literally too much for any one person to know, and it’s been that way for a very long time. Just give it your all, and memorize how to reliably search and look things up; take notes for the really important stuff. The rest will filter into your memory with practice.

          Also: anyone that holds this kind of thing over your head is attempting to distract from how much they don’t know. Most people in this industry understand and don’t judge.

          As for the ^ thing, I recall seeing that as far back as the 1990’s. I want to say Microsoft actually popularized it, but it could easily be OS2 (IBM) or Apple. In hindsight, it’s kind of wild to have a TUI (terminal user interface) hold your hand like this. Nano (and Pico) are kind of in a special category like that.

    • bufalo1973@lemm.ee
      4·
      2 days ago

      Do you remember the “press any key to exit”? Someone asked where is the “any” key.

    • lorty@lemmygrad.ml
      1·
      1 day ago

      I mean, maybe it was just me but I had to search what the hell ^ meant in nano, but after that it was alright.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zone
        6·
        2 days ago

        Read as in, with their eyes? Or how to ingest it into some other app/script? Cos I’m vaguely aware that awk can be used in some way for this, but wouldn’t have a clue how.

  • wer2@lemm.ee
    2·
    24 hours ago

    I know someone that still uses ed for all their code editing.

  • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
    35·
    2 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!”

    • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      5·
      1 day 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·
        1 day 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·
      2 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·
          1 day 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
      1·
      9 hours 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.)

      • Prime_Minister_Keyes@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 day 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.

    • exu@feditown.comEnglish
      53·
      2 days ago

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