This is just insane.  I honestly think if I went to or graduated from college I would have ended up working at Starbucks.  I've heard from several kids with whom I've let intern and work on projects that they learned WAY more about coding and software development from me than their entire class IN A SINGLE DAY.  I always figured they learned more from me since they were jumping in on real-world projects and I was like the application project supervisor version of R. Lee Ermy's character in "Platoon" but I always thought it was a little hyperbolic, but after watching this video, I'm wondering if it's true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAf7Y6DWsh0

Wow....!
I'm self taught, but, decided to take a couple of coding classes, because I was "stuck" in coding - figured I might find some "help".   Waste of time.  The instructor said, the code I was writing was too complex, and she'd give me an "A" if it simply helped the rest of the class.  Figured... at some point in the class, maybe alternative ideas would come to light, and I could "move on" with my BBS projects.

My two oldest boys are also self-taught coders.  They run circles around the other team members, class members.  This "learn to code" nonsense is probably producing more empty heads than real coders, or drag-n-drop coders who completely lack basic understanding, logic, or the ability to "spell"... LOL
Coding takes commitment, a different way of thinking, innovation... a clear head.

A decent coder, paired up with people willing to learn, can benefit everyone, including themselves.
When I had a couple of "weekend interns" helping me, it was like a "coding treasure hunt", discovering which method used the least memory, but did the same thing.  We re-wrote some routines 5-6 times, just to compact the code or optimize it for speed.  But.... when I got some guys, who were "shoved into coding" by a parent, or chasing $ ... I couldn't waste the time bringing them up to speed & they were more interested in the free meals than anything computer related.  Maybe they went on to become Supervisors...?   LOL

My oldest son is totally burnt out on coding from home.  He'd rather work with other people, solving problems, than what he's been doing.   Last year, he travelled quite a bit, coding on the road, using internet connections & VPN tunneling to connect to work.   I think he's "done" with that profession.

Quote from: Hoofer on March 24, 2021, 08:58:42 AM
Wow....!
I'm self taught, but, decided to take a couple of coding classes, because I was "stuck" in coding - figured I might find some "help".   Waste of time.  The instructor said, the code I was writing was too complex, and she'd give me an "A" if it simply helped the rest of the class.  Figured... at some point in the class, maybe alternative ideas would come to light, and I could "move on" with my BBS projects.

My two oldest boys are also self-taught coders.  They run circles around the other team members, class members.  This "learn to code" nonsense is probably producing more empty heads than real coders, or drag-n-drop coders who completely lack basic understanding, logic, or the ability to "spell"... LOL

OMG you nailed it.

Quote
Coding takes commitment, a different way of thinking, innovation... a clear head.

A decent coder, paired up with people willing to learn, can benefit everyone, including themselves.
When I had a couple of "weekend interns" helping me, it was like a "coding treasure hunt", discovering which method used the least memory, but did the same thing.  We re-wrote some routines 5-6 times, just to compact the code or optimize it for speed.  But.... when I got some guys, who were "shoved into coding" by a parent, or chasing $ ... I couldn't waste the time bringing them up to speed & they were more interested in the free meals than anything computer related.

I think you're spot on with this.

Quote
  Maybe they went on to become Supervisors...?   LOL

My oldest son is totally burnt out on coding from home.  He'd rather work with other people, solving problems, than what he's been doing.   Last year, he travelled quite a bit, coding on the road, using internet connections & VPN tunneling to connect to work.   I think he's "done" with that profession.

They must be young.  I need my nice cushy work area and big monitors.

Big monitors.... LOL... I coded on a 14" square Green Screen.  After a day of coding, the green looked like light blue.  Hard to imagine coding on a 24" wide screen ... my comments wouldn't wrap around.  Heck, sometimes the comments were 3-4 lines, to explain what the hell I was thinking what I wrote that complex line of gobbly-gook that took 3hrs to debug.

I still maintain, drag-n-drop isn't making better coders, just lazy thinkers.  I bet they don't even worry about syntax.

One class I took, I decided to write as few lines as possible, with multiple functions on each line... using all 255 characters... if I could.  At first, the instructor rejected it, then she saw it compiled and ran... a second, third look... still got an "A".

Still got the entire code from a BBS I wrote in the 1980s... all in MBasic... ran on 8bit, 4Mhz, CPM, CPUs - gave me about 45k of memory to work with.  It got so big, I made liberal use of COMMONs and CHAINs to reload modules - do coders still do that today?  Or just add more memory?  It was pretty fast back then, but when we ran it a couple of years ago - it was very, very fast.

Those days are long gone... it was better for my marriage to quit coding...  "Honey, GOSUB the Fridge, RETURN with a Mountain Dew?" - she didn't think that was funny.

Quote from: taxed on March 24, 2021, 08:28:12 AM
This is just insane.  I honestly think if I went to or graduated from college I would have ended up working at Starbucks.  I've heard from several kids with whom I've let intern and work on projects that they learned WAY more about coding and software development from me than their entire class IN A SINGLE DAY.  I always figured they learned more from me since they were jumping in on real-world projects and I was like the application project supervisor version of R. Lee Ermy's character in "Platoon" but I always thought it was a little hyperbolic, but after watching this video, I'm wondering if it's true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAf7Y6DWsh0

That's nothing new or even odd. I've had EEs with masters degrees working for me that couldn't design diddly squat on their own. When their modeling CAE programmed design didn't work out as is usual for anything more complex than a battery and light bulb they were simply stuck and didn't know what to do. They'd just sit there stupified with a little trickle of drool running down their chin with a blank stare on their faces as if they'd just encountered the impossible.

Quote from: dickfoster on March 24, 2021, 09:51:31 AM
That's nothing new or even odd. I've had EEs with masters degrees working for me that couldn't design diddly squat on their own. When their modeling CAE programmed design didn't work out as is usual for anything more complex than a battery and light bulb they were simply stuck and didn't know what to do. They'd just sit there stupified with a little trickle of drool running down their chin with a blank stare on their faces as if they'd just encountered the impossible.

Run into that ALL-THE-TIME in HAM radio. 
They fall into 2 categories, a. Broadcast Engineer & b. Modeling experts.

a. Broadcast Engineers don't think about receiving antennas, antenna efficiency - just add power, make the match work - done!
b. Modeling Experts - if the math isn't right, ground isn't perfect - it doesn't get built (or bought).

"Wha... you're selling that ...?  Oh, you ought to do this, and that, and then it would..."
You ever build one?
"Well, no, not like that, but..."
Here's the scan of the antenna, it's resonate on frequency and has a Return loss of -48db.
"Wow, out of that little thing? How'd you do it?  It should have had... " - a lecture, starting with their education, experience, job history...sigh.

I can't just walk away from my table, and this guy is determined to "correct" me, or convert me... sigh.
Next year, at the same HAMfest ... they buy one of those antennas they said they could improve upon.

Lefties tell you to "learn to code". You go to a leftist college, and you get brainwashed in leftism, but you don't seem to get trained in coding.

Quote from: Hoofer on March 24, 2021, 09:48:16 AM
Big monitors.... LOL... I coded on a 14" square Green Screen. 

I remember those days...

Quote
After a day of coding, the green looked like light blue.  Hard to imagine coding on a 24" wide screen ... my comments wouldn't wrap around.  Heck, sometimes the comments were 3-4 lines, to explain what the hell I was thinking what I wrote that complex line of gobbly-gook that took 3hrs to debug.

When I was young my dad bought one of those amber-colored monitors that was supposed to be good for the eyes.  I wonder if he saved me from worse vision than I already have.

Quote
I still maintain, drag-n-drop isn't making better coders, just lazy thinkers.  I bet they don't even worry about syntax.

You know, that's probably next... AI as a pre-processor.

Quote
One class I took, I decided to write as few lines as possible, with multiple functions on each line... using all 255 characters... if I could.  At first, the instructor rejected it, then she saw it compiled and ran... a second, third look... still got an "A".

Still got the entire code from a BBS I wrote in the 1980s... all in MBasic... ran on 8bit, 4Mhz, CPM, CPUs - gave me about 45k of memory to work with.  It got so big, I made liberal use of COMMONs and CHAINs to reload modules - do coders still do that today?  Or just add more memory?  It was pretty fast back then, but when we ran it a couple of years ago - it was very, very fast.

That's another thing too... kids nowadays don't have to worry about memory.  It's just there, and it magically gets freed.

Quote
Those days are long gone... it was better for my marriage to quit coding...  "Honey, GOSUB the Fridge, RETURN with a Mountain Dew?" - she didn't think that was funny.

I do miss them.

Quote from: dickfoster on March 24, 2021, 09:51:31 AM
That's nothing new or even odd. I've had EEs with masters degrees working for me that couldn't design diddly squat on their own. When their modeling CAE programmed design didn't work out as is usual for anything more complex than a battery and light bulb they were simply stuck and didn't know what to do. They'd just sit there stupified with a little trickle of drool running down their chin with a blank stare on their faces as if they'd just encountered the impossible.

That is really sad.

Quote from: Sick Of Silence on March 24, 2021, 10:42:51 AM
Lefties tell you to "learn to code". You go to a leftist college, and you get brainwashed in leftism, but you don't seem to get trained in coding.

That's a great point.

Quote from: taxed on March 24, 2021, 10:50:16 AM
That is really sad.

It is what it is because our educational system is worthless as tits on a boar these days. It's only function has degenerated to a system that's only aim is to provide employment to the otherwise unemployable shit for brains types in academia. Worse yet are the completly useless liberal arts programs.

After my black and white TI 99/4a monitor, i got a 12" monochrome green monitor. That was so cool. Then I upgraded to the 14" monochrome amber and was the talk of the town, well at least the neighborhood, well at least I talked about it at our house!

Now I drive a 34" LG ultrawide curved display. With that I can have four full apps displayed up without having to scale any one of the four. I can only imagine how short it is making my attention...birdie!

After the Green Screens (Epson QX-10s... I had a bunch of them running the BBS), I next got a few 286 machines with Paper White monitors... talk about ruining your eyesight!  Took about a bank loan to buy them - was looking at a complete BBS re-write in the late '80s so I could migrate to Server based, Cubix boards on the server's buss.

What I really missed, we edited the CP/M operating system, removing the Delete, Rename, Format, all kinds of functions, as a preventative for someone accidently dropping to DOS & crashing our Boards.  I couldn't edit DOS, and it kinda left me STUCK in MS-Basic, while other SYSOPS migrated to UNIX / LINUX.  I had a lot more functions than they ever had, so we still got the big numbers in calls, compared to them.  The advent of the Internet just killed BBS systems, we pulled the plug in 1996.. and I threw away a bunch of Epson QX-10 machines, I'd love to have back... they were all dying, the soldier they used on the motherboards was shorting things out (I heard), just suddenly, they'd freeze up, and never reboot again.

I tried Power Basic, MIX C, a bunch of other compliers, we were so fast at generating code on-the-fly, stopping to learn another programming language, even thought the programming logic was the same, the syntax was different, or the limitations we'd gotten use to, somethings other languages just didn't do well.  BASIC-80 & MBasic handled strings & integers, able to treat them as either or, so simply, converting to "C" or a plus version, I knew, either I'd do it to remain a programmer, or say "bye" to coding forever.  "Bye".

I seldom ever coded again, occasionally to write a quick utility, for something that didn't exist in MS-DOS or Windows - all those great 8-bit disk & file utilities just *vanished* with 16-bit, or became unusable because the hard drives or memory grew so big.  Utilities like Xtree and some other file opener/editor that opened anything, BYTE by BYTE for editing... I heard some guys hacked into AT&T telephone switches, (UNIX based OS) using that CP/M-80 disk utility....

Quote from: Hoofer on April 11, 2021, 04:49:35 PM
After the Green Screens (Epson QX-10s... I had a bunch of them running the BBS), I next got a few 286 machines with Paper White monitors... talk about ruining your eyesight!  Took about a bank loan to buy them - was looking at a complete BBS re-write in the late '80s so I could migrate to Server based, Cubix boards on the server's buss.

What I really missed, we edited the CP/M operating system, removing the Delete, Rename, Format, all kinds of functions, as a preventative for someone accidently dropping to DOS & crashing our Boards.  I couldn't edit DOS, and it kinda left me STUCK in MS-Basic, while other SYSOPS migrated to UNIX / LINUX.  I had a lot more functions than they ever had, so we still got the big numbers in calls, compared to them.  The advent of the Internet just killed BBS systems, we pulled the plug in 1996.. and I threw away a bunch of Epson QX-10 machines, I'd love to have back... they were all dying, the soldier they used on the motherboards was shorting things out (I heard), just suddenly, they'd freeze up, and never reboot again.

I tried Power Basic, MIX C, a bunch of other compliers, we were so fast at generating code on-the-fly, stopping to learn another programming language, even thought the programming logic was the same, the syntax was different, or the limitations we'd gotten use to, somethings other languages just didn't do well.  BASIC-80 & MBasic handled strings & integers, able to treat them as either or, so simply, converting to "C" or a plus version, I knew, either I'd do it to remain a programmer, or say "bye" to coding forever.  "Bye".

I seldom ever coded again, occasionally to write a quick utility, for something that didn't exist in MS-DOS or Windows - all those great 8-bit disk & file utilities just *vanished* with 16-bit, or became unusable because the hard drives or memory grew so big.  Utilities like Xtree and some other file opener/editor that opened anything, BYTE by BYTE for editing... I heard some guys hacked into AT&T telephone switches, (UNIX based OS) using that CP/M-80 disk utility....

You would have loved working for my group. We assembly coded every piece of code we did including disassemblers for dos based logic analysers. Great fun debugging that stuff.

Quote from: dickfoster on April 11, 2021, 05:25:43 PM
You would have loved working for my group. We assembly coded every piece of code we did including disassemblers for dos based logic analyzers. Great fun debugging that stuff.

a good coder / debugger lives, breathes, dreams that stuff.  I still troubleshoot problems in my sleep - meh... maybe I'm wired that way?
I approached coding as sort of a competitive sport, writing the fastest, compact, fall-thru code - and being the first to put it up on the BBS system.  When we put up the first online game, it drew hundreds of first timers.  Same with CHAT, it drew people like honey.

We were pretty good at coding, and it naturally spilled over into ... lol... "debugging other's software"... and ... "opening things up" that wasn't as secure as commercial software was sold as.   Not being a UNIX programmer - meh, so cares, it didn't slow us down a bit, probably helped us think outside the programming box.  Our debug of AT&Ts switch, written in UNIX, took me.... 5 minutes to open up, and 3 attempts to completely decode how they encrypted / hashed their passwords & access levels.   That one was really... really simple.   Covering our tracks was more difficult, lol, having to fill up the FIFO log with "junk" to not be so OBVIOUS we had been in there at access levels only the coders knew about.  One time - we had to "temporarily block" remote access "RMATS" from catching us, while we filled the log....  it must have been a little frustrating for them - but, would have been obvious, seeing dozens of logins & logouts without any activity - something fishy was going on.

Curiously, we were NOT coding for a living, just part of a hobby, running a BBS we're written software for.   Some of the code was heavily modified from other's work, PC were so propriety back then, nothing was standardized.  Modem routines & addressing COM ports was written by looking at what someone else did, and then spending weeks or months, writing & debugging your own.   US Robotics had a special deal for BBS operators - we got everything at 1/2 price, and got it first. 

By contrast, our professional coder friends were painfully -slow- almost afraid to try something different... kinda "stuck" in the way they approached problem solving ... I knew none of us would *ever* make it in that environment.  We coded so fast, if it was ever going to be fully commented, it would have taken one of us, just to write the comments/remarks.  I think the pros must write the comments before the code, 'cause the comments make more sense that what the darn spaghetti code is trying to do!