• rtxn@lemmy.world
        411·
        6 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.

      • moomoomoo309@programming.devEnglish
        11·
        5 days 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·
          5 days 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.

      • raman_klogius@ani.socialEnglish
        121·
        6 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·
        6 days ago

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

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        5 days 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·
        5 days ago

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

          • barsoap@lemm.ee
            71·
            6 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·
                5 days 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·
                  5 days 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.

  • hope@lemmy.world
    117·
    6 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·
        5 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·
          5 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·
            5 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·
              3 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·
        6 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.

  • excral@feddit.org
    571·
    6 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
      23·
      6 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.

      • ByteJunk@lemmy.world
        14·
        6 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·
          6 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·
            6 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.

      • Omgpwnies@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        5 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.

    • Rose@slrpnk.net
      14·
      5 days 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.)

        • toddestan@lemm.ee
          5·
          5 days 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
          1·
          5 days 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·
        5 days ago

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

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      9·
      5 days 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.

    • letsgo@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      5 days ago

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

    • impedans@lemmy.world
      9·
      6 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.

        • impedans@lemmy.world
          4·
          6 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

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        5 days 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.

    • bisby@lemmy.worldEnglish
      63·
      6 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·
      5 days 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·
        5 days 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·
          5 days 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·
      5 days ago

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

    • lorty@lemmygrad.ml
      1·
      5 days 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
        5·
        6 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.

  • milkisklim@lemm.ee
    62·
    6 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
      17·
      6 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

    • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
      5·
      6 days ago

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

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 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.

  • arudesalad@sh.itjust.works
    42·
    6 days ago

    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

    • Redkey@programming.dev
      9·
      6 days ago

      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.

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
      11·
      6 days ago

      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?

      • zurohki@aussie.zoneEnglish
        4·
        6 days ago

        You couldn’t crank your CPU in the olden days, it’d make games run in fast forward.

      • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 days ago

        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.

  • gradual@lemmings.world
    173·
    5 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·
      4 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.

    • frezik@midwest.social
      2·
      4 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.)

      • Prime_Minister_Keyes@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        5 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.

    • exu@feditown.comEnglish
      43·
      6 days ago

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

  • Lemminary@lemmy.world
    35·
    6 days ago

    Hey buddy, if I fix one bug and cause three more, it’s called job security. Where’s my medal?

  • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
    29·
    6 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!”

    • Rin@lemm.ee
      7·
      6 days ago
      .parent {
    display: grid;
    place-items: center;
}

      couldn’t be easier in 2025.

      • PoPoP@lemm.ee
        31·
        6 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…