That’s, uh, not what PIA means in this thread.

Excellent question! Commenting to follow.

People actually like infinite scroll?

I’m glad someone is saying it. I’m a software engineer and someone elsewhere in this thread is giving me shit for not having much use for the low level stuff.

I was teaching a junior about character encoding a couple of months ago (I suspect his CS degree came free in a box of cereal) but most of what we do is build tooling on top of other tooling. I’m not working on bare metal here!

You’re in a foul mood today, aren’t you? Okay, hope tomorrow is better. I’m not arguing with you about whatever this nonsense is.

Your continuing inability to engage in an even remotely constructive way is really tragic.

Instead of seeing my response as “He takes my point and sees that his initial comment was too broad. We could have a conversation” it just ends up as an opportunity for you to make this community more hostile. That’s so sad.

Hopefully you’re just having a bad day.

Respond to the point or bugger off.

Calling me out on a clarification when you’re banging on with ad hominem rubbish?

Respond to the point or bugger off. I’m not here to impress you, you’re not my dad.

Third, that sloppiness and failure to pay attention is only reinforcing my initial impression.

A good engineer knows when the details matter and when it’s just wasting everyone’s time. Would you classify responding to someone being needlessly hostile as something other than a waste of time?

If anything you should be criticising me for choosing to spaff more time on this conversation.

Hah! You picked the two of your that list that I actually do care about.

• pointers * allocation * reference vs value * recursion * stack * panics, errors, error propagation * data structures

I don’t know what pointers are. I don’t care about memory allocation. Recursion rarely comes up.
That’s not the kind of codebase I work with. I guess I’m not a proper big-boy programmer 😢

Anyway, your snide remarks about my abilities aside, that doesn’t address my point at all.

I’ve been working as a software engineer for years and not once have those “fundamentals” been relevant to the work I do.

If I question their usefulness then I don’t think it’ll sit well with no experience at all.

I didn’t find the difference in fundamentals between Python and C to be substantial. C felt similar but more unintuitive and more annoying to work with due to having to compile.

Understanding exactly how the sausage is made didn’t help me in the slightest. It was needless complexity when I already had a lot to digest.

I understand your perspective but for me it was like throwing up countless roadblocks to the point where I lost all enthusiasm for the subject.

It was many years before I tried again, this time with JS and Python.

These days I’m a professional software engineer.

I was taught a bit of C and still don’t understand why. I see the use of C but it feels much too low level to be useful for the kinds of things I might want to do.

Python and JS are much more relatable.

Edit: I’m getting a lot of hate for this “hot take” for some reason. I don’t know what to tell you, people learn this stuff differently. For me the “from first principles” approach framed programming as something I shouldn’t bother with because it’d be forever until I learned how to do anything useful with it.

To me C and C++ seem powerful but it feels like having to invent the universe before I can get anything done. I’m not working on embedded systems or something.

Don’t reinvent the wheel, learn the Baguette on Snails framework!

I prefer writing JSON by hand. The whitespace stuff in YAML is just such a nuisance as far as I’m concerned, which is odd as I have no problem with it in Python.

As someone who works with YAML regularly:

Fuck YAML.

Internal monologue ≠ thought

GitHub was founded in 2008 so nearly half its life it has been owned my MS. Yeah, “recent” doesn’t feel like a good fit here.

I thought they bought GitHub ages ago?

Nice! I’ll update my container and give it a go.

Hmmm, an RPi with a camera might well work. The problem there is more the amount of work I’d need to do - I haven’t got that kind of time right now.