Re: [tlug] QQ - consider it a poll (TDD)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephenjturnbull@example.com>]

Curt J. Sampson writes:

 > I know of various groups that sit down to "study" things, or talk
 > about them, or whatever. I don't know of any groups that regularly
 > get together and do real programming on real programs on a regular
 > basis.

They're called "open source software projects," no? ;-)

 > On 2021-11-14 03:48 +0900 (Sun), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > 
 > > It takes a couple of senior people with serious volunteer spirit
 > > to onboard the newbies rather than dive right into the hacking,
 > > but in my experience work gets done and people have a lot of fun.
 > 
 > Honestly, I'm not sure that things wouldn't work if instead of
 > significant "onboarding" you instead had the newbies "trail"
 > developers doing actual work and pick up what they can.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way.  I've done sprints as
"senior" with GNU Mailman and as "junior" with Python core and a
couple of other random sprints.  A lot of "real work" has to do with
"our way of doing things" and "how to get the source code," and that's
not something you pick up by trailing the core developers for whom
"our way" is second nature and "the source" is already in a local git
repo.

 > > ...said she never understood for loops until she made the lights blink
 > > different colors.  (insert WTF emoji here) I have no clue how she can
 > > feel that way :-)
 > 
 > That's simple. She hadn't yet been indoctrinated into the modern
 > programmer's screwy orthodoxy and, being naïve, didn't understand that
 > simple recursion was to be treated as a terrible thing to be feared and the
 > far more complex and less general "for" and "while" loops must be hailed as
 > the "easy" thing.

Yeah, no.  I know for a fact she still doesn't get recursion, although
she's an expert on recidivism. ;-)

 > > I wonder if Curt (or any other of the folks who do hardware
 > > whether as a product or retrocomputing) have similar stories?
 > 
 > Not really, no. Understanding all the layers of hardware has been
 > incredibly valuable to me, and really honed my intuition for what's
 > going on, but this doesn't seem a parallel situation. After all, on
 > the hardware itself, in machine-language, we don't have "for"
 > loops; we have "goto" and "if ... goto", and that's it. All that
 > "for" loop stuff is a bunch of software performing magic to turn
 > the former into the latter.

I was more thinking you might have seen it in someone else, than that
you might have experienced it. :-D

Steve