he/himComplaining on Tumblr is a good alternative to punching my computer screen, right?
72 posts
Latest Posts by cssengineer - Page 2
Raise your hand if you spend more time criticizing yourself for inefficient use of keyboard shortcuts than you would actually save by using them
Typing a paper for class and one of my subheadings reads, ”What’s the point of working?” And I didn’t think through how much that would affect my ability to write the rest of the essay.
React makes life almost too easy. I worry that I’m missing something.
What’s the end game here?
You know how there are a lot of programming languages that people say are “really powerful if you know how to use them”? And how usually those languages aren’t at all worth the time? I think Haskell might actually be worth the time. After a hiatus I’ve come back to it and love it. I hardly know how to use it, but at least I can perceive how it might be really powerful.
Prolog is still the worst, though.
I like Cilk++. It’s so nice to just be like “Hey I want this for loop to have some parallelism” then only have to replace the “for” with “cilk_for”.
and an unholy amount of linear algebra
Looking at you, C++
I won't ever take you back.
And yet it hurts that you don't even want me to.
Thanks Visual Studio + Chromium browser for making a nice warm section on the UNDERSIDE of my desk below my laptop.
Before and after adding css animations
before and after tie dye
It’s interesting how as I’ve progressed as a programmer the things I turn to for therapy have also progressed.
At first it was Scratch: after a span of getting frustrated by Python I would play with Scratch to at least make things that did what I wanted them to.
A little while later I wrote HTML and CSS to feel good about myself, because even when the default padding for <body> screws up your positioning there’s at least SOMETHING on the screen instead of an aggressive error message.
Now, it’s python. When Scheme or Haskell or C or Java or C# (less so C# - it’s actually pretty nice) or even Javascript are bothering me I can always turn to Python to feel better.
I wonder what it’ll be next? Maybe one day I’ll see C++ as my relief. Probably not. But maybe. Perhaps the final evolution of a programmer is when you can feel completely peaceful while writing Posix level C. Perhaps even assembly. Probably not. But perhaps.
Long live Indices
Question for a higher power: Is the ability to access specific list indices something I’ve always taken for granted? Or should it be an expectation?
Scheme’s implementation of a “list” is a series of nested pairs (sorta nested - I’m calling it that even though that’s not completely correct), so you can either get the first element in the list or all of the others UNLESS you know the specific index you need in a constant fashion (i.e. “c” + [combination of “a”s and “d”s] + “r”).
Haskell has those sweet sweet index accessors we all know and love from C and it’s children and even most of it’s counterparts. Even in C itself there was functionality to store an address to a pointer and then just do pointer arithmetic to access an index like arr[2] -> 0x#{ADDRESS OF arr} + 2. It’s simple and straightforward, so I don’t feel like I’m being difficult to expect that of my programming language. Am I, though?
You’ve probably noticed by now that this post isn’t meant to be a coherent case for anything; it’s more of a ramble and a rant. Honestly, though, just give me accessors (and mutatability too please... I’m looking at you Go. Nobody thinks you’re slick with your whole “arrays are static and annoying use slices because we’re edgy”).
(define begone ‘(Go away scheme))
Out with the old...
and in with the new...
I feel like the creators of Scheme were really big fans of yoda’s verbal syntax.
Writing mergesort in Scheme makes me sooo grateful for python. And Javascript. And Java. And Ruby. And C#. Heck, I’m even grateful for C, at least it lets you access specific list indices.
In case anyone is curious I still haven’t organized that first react project. Ironically, of everything I’ve ever made it is currently the most popular, and it only took 4 hours to make. Heavy sigh.
Upon actually working with excel, I’m done being pretentious about how it’s not programming. Tremendous respect goes to anyone who can do things with excel.
Guess who jumped into his first React project without any planning and now continues to add features thereby creating a monstrosity of spaghetti code. THIS guy!
WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WANTED TO PUT THIS MANY PARENTHESES IN SCHEME. MY IDE IS LITERALLY OUT OF COLORS FOR THE AMOUNT OF PARENTHESES I AM TYPING.
Went to React’s website to learn the Tic Tac Toe tutorial (it’s about time I got around to it) and was pleasantly surprised to see this. Way to go, React.
Black People in Programming/Computer Science
This is BY NO MEANS an exhaustive list. In fact, there are MANY, MANY, MORE. I’m just trying to draw attention to the major contributions black people have made to the Computer Science / Programming community.
BLACK LIVES MATTER.
- Lindsay Grace : Designing games with social impacts.
- Marsha Williams : First black woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science. She also lead many initiatives to increase black representation in STEM careers.
- Clennita Justice, Aggrey Jacobs, and Travis McPhail : Employees at Google improving Google Play Books and Google Maps.
- Katherine Johnson : Her work with NASA was critical in putting humans in space.
- Clarence Ellis : First black man to get a PhD in Computer Science. He pioneered Operational Transformation, early group collaboration software for plaintext documents.
- Dorothy Vaughan : Paved the way for African American females at NASA and in programming in general. TAUGHT HERSELF FORTRAN. BEFORE THE INTERNET WAS INVENTED. Imagine trying to learn a low-level programming language WITHOUT Stackoverflow or even ctrl + f.
For those of you who are worried about AI taking over the world, this is the sentence produced by a “neural network” (a fancy name for my relative frequency matrix) after I had it read Beowulf, Galen, Guinea, Little Women, Mansfield Park, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Call of the Wild. (All are freely available on Project Gutenberg in many filetypes including plain text, btw).
Being able to access all of the WSL distros, the powershell, and the cmd from the same place is a super cool feature with the new windows terminal, but you know what’s even cooler? Getting to change all of the colors and fonts so easily. I’m very happy.
I have so much respect for the ToString() method of Pandas Dataframes in Python.
If you’re wondering why, it’s because I’m currently trying to make a halfway decent depiction of a C# matrix multidimensional array that just puts my hashkeys in the right places and things are not going well at all.
Making a favicon for your website is one of the simple pleasures.
All that wasted time
You know what I haven’t thought about in while? Ruby. Maybe I need to polish off the old gemstone.
I can’t even style a SCROLLBAR without it looking like a potato.