what are we even doing here man

[henryk@chaos.social]

@revk @foone That is one of my memories from programming as a child. I was ~10 years old. I saw the starry night screensaver in Norton Commander and wanted a similar effect in QBasic.
Lots of copy and paste later I had like 15 pairs of x,y coordinate variables (x1,y1,x2,y2,.…), a cycle counter that goes from 1 to 15, and a shitload of if then clauses: delete star at x1,y1, assign new coordinates, paint star, wait, delete star at x2, y2, etc. pp.
It was awesome, but was hard to add more stars.

[jsmuellerroemer@c.im]

@foone I’m pretty sure I had that book

[jsmuellerroemer@c.im]

@foone I get redirected to the German site with no option to switch pack (the 404 references a non-existent dropdown menu…)

[weirdocollector@livellosegreto.it]

@foone Unfortunately links goes to 404

[kirtai@tech.lgbt]

@foone
Ooh, they have the text adventure ones

[billgoats@bitbang.social]

@foone

[riley@toot.cat]

@foone Pedant point: there have been some rather popular historic languages that eschewed arrays as we know them for "associative arrays", like Mumps, AWK, and PHP.

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@gunstick @foone I vaguely recall someone like Atari having a patent on a register that shifts the entire screen left. So someone else (Sega?) made a register that shifts it right instead. It's really annoying that it goes the wrong way, but it avoided the patent.

[riley@toot.cat]

@somekindofgarf

• There’s a minimum crew requirement.
• What’s that?
• One, I suppose.

@foone

[petersommerlad@mastodon.social]

@foone

when i reached 50 skills on linkedin i was told that this was the limit. (most of those proposed by others)

So be careful what you announce as skill.

but handling sequences in programming isn't a skill, it is elementary.

[riley@toot.cat]

@h5e I have heard that there once genuinely was a young man from Japan who didn't know that keyboards existed, and became a proficient programmer of one of the early game consoles, possibly first-generation Famicom, by using the on-screen entry mechanism that came as a demo with some devkit.

And then, he got his hands on a keyboard.

@foone

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@gunstick @foone (all these patents are way out of date of course DO NOT TALK ABOUT LIVE PATENTS)

[riley@toot.cat]

@h5e Sakurai Masahiro.

@foone

[llogiq@hachyderm.io]

@JSMuellerRoemer @foone same here.

[mo@mastodon.ml]

@akent keep looking forward, I hope you'll find it

@foone

[mrwedders@social.linux.pizza]

You laugh but I joined an org once where because passing arrays to functions required handling references they instead used big CSV strings in 99% of cases. Drove me insane.

[karpour@mstdn.social]

@foone Boy not only do I have worked with arrays, I also have extensive experience both pressing and releasing (!) keys on business workstation keyboards. Am I hired?

[darkling@mstdn.social]

@foone Doesn't Lua use only dictionaries for data structures? IIRC, its "arrays" are just dictionaries indexed by integers.

[ruawhitepaw@chitter.xyz]

@karpour @foone You can produce arrays of characters faster if you don't release the keys.

[gunstick@mastodon.opencloud.lu]

@TomF @foone
I came up with the code many years before IBM filed their patent