Here's an "oldie but goodie" that made a lasting impression on me and I thought others would enjoy it. I still find the writing style to be humorous and engaging. "The Code of Abibarshim" -- which appears at the end of the linked page -- makes excellent recommendations, but I cannot say I entirely agree with all of them. Take the first one, for starters. I sense it is not so much that the name changed but that old names were allowed to persist, unchanged. As long as all instances of the old name are found and updated, I sense there is very little cause for concern. But I've already said too much. Do read the whole article! Why not take a few minutes and enjoy from some light-hearted reading? What did you like? What, if anything, would you recommend changing in his 10 conclusions?
Credit: As best I have been able to verify, this was originally credited to Paul Pendragon and published in "Production Engineering", July, 1981.
Beware the Wrath of Abibarshim!
I, Abibarshim, Great King, King of Kings, Ruler of Kish, Babil, Agade and Sankhar, and of the regions across the Hilla, conqueror of Ninevah, destroyer of Sepharia, having striven mightily and met with grief, lay down this Code that ye may not also strive mightily and meet with grief, nor fall flat on thy ass.
For I, Abibarshim, King of Kings, and all that, did buy many Aethyopeans and hire many artisans and scribes and masons and Makers of Engines and Designers of Buildings. And great was their craft and great their number, which was one hundred and forty four thousand, give or take a few job-shoppers. Yea, they did strive mightily, too, for they knew what would happen if they strove not mightily. And the name of my capital improvement project was the Tower of Babil.
Yea, great was their craft and wonderful to behold what the Designers of Buildings wrought on the papyrus. All who looked thereon did marvel at their genius. I, Abibarshim, did also look thereon and did declare their designs to have much nift.
But many days did pass, and many times did the moon wax and wane, and the tower was not yet builded.
So I, Abibarshim, King of Kings, did hie me to the palace by the Arakhtu where dwelt the Designers of Buildings and Makers of Engines. And there I found not Designers of Buildings and Makers of Engines, but Drinkers of Coffee and Tellers of Tales (whom men call hurlers of bull dung). So I vented my royal spleen, which did perturb them mightily.
"Look here, O King, etc.," said the Chief of the Makers of Engines. "Some things can't be rushed. If thou wantest us to get thy bloody tower builded on time, then thou hadst better give us a little respect. For canst thou build thy tower without us?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pkrasimirov on Monday April 06 2020, @03:37PM (2 children)
Thank you for sharing! :)
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday April 06 2020, @08:48PM (1 child)
Unfortunately coding has changed. Nowadays, to defeat the SJW horde, we need to utilize the manifesto from the story behind this. [wikimedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @04:44PM
Just use Eunuchs.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by bobmorning on Monday April 06 2020, @03:46PM (17 children)
Come on, why is this on Soylent .... slow news day?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Monday April 06 2020, @03:51PM (12 children)
If you put all of the coronavirus-related news in one single pile and ignore it, every day is kind of a slow news day.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @06:17PM (11 children)
Yes, it turns out that when people don't go outside, there's not much news.
My only disappointment is that with so many geeks on the site, that nobody is posting geeky projects. Personally, I'm an essential worker, so I don't get to just stay at home all day, but it would be cool, if people could post some of their projects.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday April 06 2020, @08:44PM (9 children)
I just got LabVIEW up and running. Got any challenges? The LabVIEW shit I already have is enough for job interview demos so I need some fresh, new, but practical ideas.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @09:33PM (8 children)
Good lord, you've got cabin fever worse than I if you are messing with LabVIEW. I try to keep the stink of that software away from me if I can, but like a dog turd it seems to still turn up on your shoe unexpectedly. My most recent exposure, I purchased a low end inexpensive arbitrary waveform generator. It supposedly came with a nice computer interface. Once you start installing it, you find out that it is some kind of LabVIEW software that is Gigabytes in size and sets up all sorts of unwanted services. No problem, it turns out that I'm not going to be controlling the generator with my computer, by since maybe some day I might, I let it be. A week later I get a LabVIEW popup window for their automatic software updater wanting to run. No, thank you, I don't want to run it. So I have to uncheck the "Remind me again in seven days" box and close the window. So guess what happens in seven days? That's right, it fucking pops up again. I, again, uncheck the "Remind me in seven days" button and close the window. Ad nauseam. Finally, I said "fuck it", and deleted the LabVIEW software suite off of my computer all together.
You want a LabVIEW challenge? Design a moderately complicated control system in LabVIEW, which will end up looking like a horrible mess of boxes and lines running all over the fucking place, then start posting to message boards that you can't understand why the performance of your "realtime" control system sucks. Walk away from it for about a week, then when you realize you need to stick some new box in the middle of that spaghetti mess, you can't figure out what the hell is going on. Then pass it on to your colleague (who is someone like me) who needs to use it and watch their heads explode as they can't comprehend why anyone would design a control system with such a shitty software system. It is the equivalent of Excel for computational work.
I have sympathy for people who have this software foisted upon them, and contempt for people who prefer this as their tool of choice.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 06 2020, @09:45PM (2 children)
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday April 06 2020, @10:17PM
He's right as far as pro jobs are concerned though, traditional written languages are better for serious professional work. Everytime you encounter a nightmare like this one [twimg.com] it's because it's a fucking C programmer wrote it without consulting the style guide.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @10:19PM
It depends upon what you want to do. LabVIEW is great if you have a modest setup like a temperature sensor or an A/D board, and you can be up and running very quickly. It is great for a high school or undergraduate science lab. But start throwing in more things, then it gets complicated very quickly. It still seems quite manageable and you can get your system working (apart from the realtime aspect), but if you have to modify or maintain the code, it is a nightmare. It is fine for one-off systems, and ok for systems that you're not going to be messing with later or if you are the only one who will ever use the code. It is a nightmare to be handed some else's project.
If you're going to do a real project with it, then use real software to run it (where "real" here is in the eye of the beholder). When it comes to dealing with hardware, you often times are faced with the choice of coding up your own RS422 comm interface, or using the vendor-supplied driver (which sometimes is LabVIEW). Then you are at that crossroads where you need to decide if you want to take the tempting "easy" crack hit, or if you want to do it the right way from the start. And like many things, sometimes schedule pushes you to the easy way and you end up paying for it in the end (how does that saying go? Why do we never have the time/budget to do it the right way at first, but we find it when we need to fix the mess later?).
Fortunately, from this standpoint at least, python is taking over the world. More and more hardware libraries can easily be called from python.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday April 06 2020, @10:04PM (4 children)
I totally get the LabVIEW hate but most people like you are just inflexible line-coders throwing their baby's first LabVIEW fits because investing an hour or two in a learning curve is too much hassle. I suppose Simulink is also for pussies? Why use Reaktor when you could write all your real-time audio modules in C++?
The only reason why I am suggesting LabVIEW is because it's a visual puzzle and as such will be more fun for me because I'm not in the mood to stare at lines of words all damn day. Maybe tomorrow, sure. Actually that's a good idea, to write a generic free of cost public domain device control framework for serial and GPIB, something I've wanted to do for awhile. And also easily doable. Problem is that a GPIB adapter and device are needed for debugging GPIB and I'm too Jewish to procure them. Don't even get me started on Modbus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @10:26PM
You're better off using Scratch. At least they are honest and up front about the fact that they are a toy language for people who don't know their ass from a thread or socket.
If you're just messing around, sure knock yourself out. Like I said, cabin fever makes us do all kinds of crazy stuff we usually end up looking back on thinking "boy, that was pretty stupid, what was I thinking?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @10:34PM (2 children)
I forgot to add: You're accusing me of hating on it because I don't want to spend the effort on the learning curve? Are you shitting me? The whole problem with it is that there IS NO LEARNING CURVE! A fucking monkey can write a LabVIEW program, and that's the problem. And National Instruments is just as bad as Mathworks: we'll charge you a couple thousand for the license, plus another thousand a year for "software maintenance", and is your code really shitty? Don't worry, for another thousand bucks you can buy a license for our De-shittifier module that will make your code less shitty (plus a few hundred more for annual maintenance).
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday April 06 2020, @11:12PM (1 child)
Actually although I'm going to be called a total fucking shill, NI has just released a beta of their free community edition (for personal/hobbyist use) with all the features of pro and with goodies geared toward shit like Arduinos and Pi's.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @06:02PM
No, I don't think you're a shill, nor do I think worse of you for playing around with it. It is interesting they have a community edition, but I will cast my jaundiced eye upon it as it feels to me to be more like the playbook of Solidworks, Mathworks, Microsoft, etc. where the first hit is free (e.g., student editions) to lock you in. You can probably do quite a bit with an Arduino or Pi with this and have a lot of fun, and I now suspect that my low end arbitrary waveform generator is probably something like that programmed in LabVIEW. However, don't build up anything important in my lab and base it on LabVIEW or I'll kick you in the nuts (or forever bind you to maintaining and reprogramming it as needed; or kick you in the nuts, then forever bind you).
I do think well of this, but only within the confines of what it is good at, which is cobble something together to quickly get data, but tear it down when you're done. You mentioned Simulink. Simulink is great for doing what its good at, which is designing control systems and other things by simulating them. But as a programming language? No. Mathworks has been trying to get into the LabVIEW space with Simulink, and no, I object for not only the same reasons, but Mathworks is even worse with their nickel-and-diming. "You want to do what? Oh, well you need to purchase this toolbox here for a modest fee."
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 07 2020, @05:17AM
I'm writing a new opengl binding for Racket. The old one is fairly obsolete.
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @05:20PM (1 child)
"Come on, why is this on Soylent .... slow news day?"
I'm going out on a limb here and guess that you're an MBA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @08:43PM
My guess is he's in marketing.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Fnord666 on Monday April 06 2020, @06:48PM
bobmorning has 0 submissions. [soylentnews.org]
Maybe this is a possible reason?
(Score: 4, Touché) by arslan on Monday April 06 2020, @08:56PM
Umm you do realize its about tech right? If that's not on SN, what else would be?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @04:13PM (2 children)
WTF ?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 06 2020, @05:06PM (1 child)
If thou art not prepared for the wisdom of Abibarshim one is destined to attempt but not be capable of flight. Repeatedly. Even if thou hast attained the position of scribe of scribes one may expect the pedal measurement of the mighty King to elevate thy posterior until one removest thy dome from such nether regions.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Monday April 06 2020, @09:49PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @07:00PM
Game over
(Score: 2) by hubie on Monday April 06 2020, @08:27PM (3 children)
I'm talking back in the 80s when it was more or less just Usenet. Maybe it is selective memory, but I recall there being lots of clever and creative stuff like this that got passed around. What I find being harder to remember this stuff, is trying to find this stuff anywhere around. It seems that Usenet all largely gone away. It used to be that you could find this kind of stuff printed out and stuck on bulletin boards in the break room or in the hallway all the time.
Maybe the reason I don't see this kind of stuff any more is because the signal-to-noise level on the net seems to have gone way down since those days. Or it is just simple nostalgia for the "better and simpler" days of yore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @08:47PM
It's all because of marketing. If you time can't be sold, you're useless.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 07 2020, @05:29AM
Technically, usenet is still around. But it has deteriorated.
Spam has even shut down alt.sex.cthulhu.
-- hendrik
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @01:46AM
I'll add a few things:
1. BBSes of all sizes had discussion boards which were lively, too, and full of well-done and time-intensive craft like this. Prior to BBSes, cafe philosophers, salons, etc. existed for exchange of prepared work like this.
2. "Older" crafts like leatherwork, woodwork, needlework, mending, drawing, painting, have also plunged. It's the rare kid today who whittles but in the 50s and especially earlier it was the norm in boys. Less pronounced but still visible is the decrease in forms of art like Abibarshim here.
3. This kind of time and creative investment to relay a message to peers/the world is now much more spent on visual (or audible) impact. Instead of taking 2-3h to write and edit this (for a fast and competent communicator having fun) a person might take the time to bake a cake with elaborate decorations, make an "epic" costume, or write and perform a short skit (cough tiktok), the image/video of which can be shared online.
4. "Bored" time is almost nil now. In the 80s, yeah some of us were "connected" and once on USENET or the larger BBS nets, there was an infinite interactive library of sorts available, but there was much higher friction in the system, and there was almost no incentivization outside of the exchanges themselves. That strongly influenced volume and quality and intent behind. Nowadays, everything online that can be, is gamified. Online access no longer tethers a person to a machine in a room, nor blocks other concurrent uses of a telephone line. Youth are simply never, ever truly bored. Even for houses with TVs, until cable ate the OTA cake, there were many times that there was "nothing good on" on the handful of channels at best.
5. Other venues provide lower-barrier outlets for this kind of thing. Look at the performance art of the RDT account here.
6. It does still happen, even this form. Look at medium.com and so on. It's true that the signal:noise is garbage now in comparison to "back then" for many different back thens, but there's gems among the dogpuke now.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2020, @09:19PM
Nothing to really discuss, but I had fun reading it, so figured I should do something to encourage these types of submissions. While I don't want joke memes to take over SoylentNews, an occasional one is a nice diversion.
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:58AM (1 child)
I guess this is supposed to be good engineering advice or something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @01:49AM
It's someone venting, clearly, and supplicating future coworkers (and the world) to act in a way they believe is less dysfunctional.
Also some intent to entertain.
You don't sound impressed.