Asklemmy

43945 readers

638 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

199

To those not in the IT industry, what do you think programming is like? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 10 months ago by httpjames@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

153 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've always been curious as to what "normal" people think programming is like. The wildest theory I've heard is "typing ones and zeroes" (I'm a software engineer)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] FollyDolly@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You guys talk to computers in the language of computers. You are trying to get the computer to do something you want. However the computer doesn't help you out, you have to tell it explicitly what to do down to the tinyist detail or it won't work and you will be sad.

To the outside observer this looks like typing gibberish and copying in chunks of more gibberish. With occasional swearing.

How'd I do? (I know very little about programming and computers, I've worked manual labor for something like 20 years.)

[–] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's pretty much bang on.

You learn pretty fast that you're an idiot and yes, you can write something, read it back many times, and still be wrong.

[–] sunbunman@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hunting that missing semicolon in 500 lines of code qq

[–] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

With that one, at least your parser should crap itself right around where the error is. You probably just need to search engine the error message, and find the page every other noob has to. Then it won't take too long.

If your thing compiles but doesn't work, then the real fun begins. You're in the magical land of Turing completeness, where you hope the problem isn't unsolvable in your case, because it definitely is in general.