what are we even doing here man

[foone@digipres.club]

Usborne released a bunch of their old 80s programming books for free a while back, and they're all just a gem:

Computer and coding books from Usborne | Usborne | Be Curious

Usborne children's coding books for a new generation

(usborne.com)

[jbaggs@infosec.exchange]

@foone I'm a little perturbed it reads: "in arrays" and not: "with arrays", to be honest.

[foone@digipres.club]

@Klara yeah apparently that's all you gotta know these days to be a developer

[gunstick@mastodon.opencloud.lu]

@TomF @foone IBM got a patent on some obscure graphics method I used many years before in demo programming around 1990.
I can't recall what it was. Maybe sprites masking with a CPU. Was something obvious

[linear@nya.social]

@foone@digipres.club i will take this opportunity to once again tell tale of the time i worked on an embedded device with a firmware written in C, roughly a 150,000-line codebase on a little STM32 chip

the original author of the code base did not, in fact, seem to understand what an array was.

the device communicated to another device bolted to the same machine, using MODBUS. with potentially up to 10,000 MODBUS registers storing data, but realistically only a few actually in use.

the file defining the structure where the data was stored for the registers simply made a struct, with elements starting at "reg0" and incrementing up to "reg10000". the implementation file was just as bad.

this is why the codebase was roughly 150,000 lines. it should have been perhaps 5000.


the code used a small function that did pointer math in order to actually access the register, usually, unless it was referenced directly in code, or sometimes used a macro instead.

none of this was even the worst offense within the codebase.

[dan@mastodon.durrans.com]

@foone I learnt everything I know from Computer Fun… I still have the book.

[nantucketlit@mastodon.social]

@foone Arrays are when it stars getting fun. I think if someone's starting out and they get excited learning about multi-dimensional arrays, that's a good sign.

[gloriouscow@oldbytes.space]

@linear @foone

embedded undertale

[kgmadee2@mathstodon.xyz]

@foone im not a developer, but I can say in good conscience that I do

[th@social.v.st]

@foone I've posted this page from Usborne's guide to jargon before and commented that I'd be happy if all programmers were as computer literate as grade school students in the 80s.

[barubary@infosec.exchange]

@foone Hey, functional programmers need jobs, too!

[nuclearoatmeal@beige.party]

@foone

Well, ok, that's a silly requirement. But do you have experience in Loops (flow control)?

[foone@digipres.club]

@th god that'd be nice

[klausman@mas.to]

@foone What's weird is that I distincly remember page 9 (its illustrations, mostly), but I don't remember the book cover. I grew up in 80s West Germany, so maybe they were used in a different (or translated) book. Definitely a nostalgia hit

[revk@toot.me.uk]

@foone reminds me of the early 80s where we got code form teachers for educational stuff. And one guy understood subroutines by not arrays. He had one that was full of
IF I=1 RETURN V1
IF I=2 RETURN V2
…
Amazing stuff.

[foone@digipres.club]

@klausman yeah, different publishers often use different covers, so I imagine the west german publisher just made their own cover

[flxtr@social.tchncs.de]

@foone For non-us users: the site is guessing your country and redirects to 404 page, if guess != "us" But it's not geo fencing. You need to pick en-us at the home page and then request the above URL again.

[seconduniverse@autistics.life]

@foone hey I know arrays! I can do big ones, small ones, multidimensional ones. I also know variables and indentation!!! Hire me!!!!!!!!

[mahadevank@mastodon.social]

@foone yeah, that's it - arrays - that's all I have experience with, give me a dict and I'm going to be stumped.

No records for me, only a long list of items lol

[mellivora@im-in.space]

@foone was confused for a minute till I saw the full thread... lol