ProgrammerHumor
thenVSnow
Discussion
I guess it has been posted across different subreddits many times. And we all know John Carmack is brilliant programmer.
I'm still disappointed he hasn't yet purchased Carmax...
My favorite "devs then" has to be incrementing the "store at address X" instruction until X overflows, switching the instruction to the next instruction code, and making it a "go to address 0" instruction.
From the good old story of Mel.
Damn I miss Usenet
Wtf does “tweaking pointers” mean? A memory leak is fixed by calling free.
Free was called on the wrong pointer
And the free is called on?
Fixing off-by-one errors so you free the right address.
Just what i thought
Smart pointers...no variables
Find me a single programmer of any time period that (with no experience of VIM or comparable programs) can exit VIM without looking it up. Until the first time you're introduced to :q (no matter the context) you most probably won't think of doing that. Then combine that with the litany of modes you can accidentally enter that will add to the confusion.
The whole reason the "can't exit VIM" thing became a joke is BECAUSE it's unintuitive to exit until you've worked with it or a comparable program.
I swear some of you take this job too seriously
People constantly mention "moon landing" as something incredibly complex, for instance in a meme that says "it only took N kilobytes to land on the moon". This is a cognitive distortion: just because moon is far away and it is expensive to build a rocket doesn't mean that the software is complex. Any person who knows anything about software development understands that any app with GUI is orders of magnitude more complex than moon landing software, which just performs a bunch of simple arithmetic operations.
True, but the cost of failure is most likely significantly higher for mission critical software like a plane or a spaceship than for a smartphone app with a GUI.
Yes. And it was also very complex for the times, and the tooling, the languages were less developed. But it is weird to compare directly and say things like "ewww, software developers are devolving".
Like I said earlier, it has nothing to do with time or tooling. It has to be done to be real time
Smart phone apps that deal with video encoder or metal programming needs to be done in ARM programming, which is an equal beast. Have a look here
I have worked with decoding radar signal and I promise you that claim has a value.
Take satellite cubesats as an example. You're working with kilobytes of memory. Programs must be small (an actual type of program that get assigned in assembly), often written in C. You don’t get modern luxuries like dynamic memory management or garbage collection. You need to manually allocate and release every byte, and fragmentation can break your system. Bitwise operations aren’t optional; they’re fundamental to control registers, flags, communication protocols, and performance-critical logic.
Even compilers can’t always be trusted. You’ll often need to inspect or write assembly to ensure the binary fits and runs within tight timing and energy constraints. Based on device, even assembly have reduced instruction set.
It’s not just programming; it’s engineering with hard limits.
If you are curious, look at open source code for OS kernels device drivers, game engines.
I was the software lead for 2 cubesats from my university during my Bachelors. I can give more details if you're curious. In all honesty, satellite code is fairly simple. The complexity was more from managing a state machine than the actual software.
Yes it's in C, and you have a hard limit on memory, but it's really not that complex. Read this register for temperature, read this register for radio packet, read this register for detector data. I never had to look at assembly code, much less write in it. That's absolutely way too extra. And allocate/free every byte? Maybe 30 years ago that would be required, but the actual program size is negligible compared to data payload size. And even assembly has reduced instruction set? What 1970's device are you flying? Is whatever company trying to save pennies by using ancient hardware? Cubesats launched from ISS have about a 1.5-3 year lifespan before they deorbit. Use a $35 raspberry pi and a 64 gig sd card, those survive space for 3 years no issue, and you won't have to worry about those tiny details.
Now managing the packets being sent to/from the radio or optimizing how detector data is stored? That is complex, but that's not exclusive to C or tight embedded systems, that's an inherent problem for all communication or storage optimization tasks.
The difference between a good programmer and a bad one is how quickly they Google the solution
Vim be damned, the future is now old man
Yes the industry is saturated, yes current programmers are worse than they were 50 years ago. But it's only that way because the tools great programmers of the past have created that lowers the barrier for entry. This so a good thing. The 10x engineers or whatever will still be there.
Current programmers are not necessarily worse than those in the past, but there are much more programmers today than there were 30 years ago and the barriers to entry into programming are practically non existent compared to former times.
You're joking, but exiting Vim is clearly harder than building a rocket to land on the moon. Not sure if anyone ever escaped it, they're still locked in there, eternally searching for an exit.
Remember, from the past you only know the top ones. 99% were generic and did repetitive programming.
Sure. Now compare the scope of projects, variety of software, libraries and frameworks, delivery schedule, possibility to work in a quiet office where you can actually concentrate, etc.
Exiting vim is really easy. You just have to restart your pc
Who is using vim exceot people who couldn't be bithered to configure git to VSCode
I'm a webdev in the middle, I started programming typescript in 2020 and needed to learn all this stuff. Now while programming I often use codepilot and chatgpt. I really wonder where this is going.
The lead developer for mission-critical flight software for the Moon landings was a woman, Margaret Hamilton, but OK.
And the guy who fixed memory leaks by tweaking pointers probably put them there in the first place.
That's a weird image of Margaret Hamilton.
https://riot-room.com/margaret-hamilton-nasa-software-engineer-for-the-apollo-moon-missions/
She got really ripped just after it
Bug what bug its a feature
So true...
Wat sa Pointa?!
Devs then: "Did your PC freeze while running the program? Probably a hardware or OS issue"
Devs now: "Did an error occur? Let me crash the program so your system won't suffer any issues"
Glad to see that inability to exit Emacs is not listed…
brave of you to assume I dont gpt "how to center a div"
Ah, yes? Ask the "Then Devs" how to center a div, let's look at them.
B
Nothing wrong with using stack overflow, the problem is relying entirely on gpt
me when cursor
Yea I tried it, it’s ok to have it write somethings but honestly I had to check everything which defeated the purpose because it would write the wrong logic and throw everything off. I used it as an advanced search engine than have it write me code.
Back then: launches a spaceship. Now: needs ChatGPT to find missing semicolon
We all know you spent a day looking for a missing semicolon back then.
Just not many understood what was done. Don’t looked amazing still. lol
Mom said it's my turn to post this tomorrow
Prompt says it's my turn to AI generate this and leave AI title and comments for engagement in 5 minutes
I made one for you! https://imgur.com/a/E4I4ONm
lol the bottom right guy
ChatGPT totally nailed it