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What are the craziest misconceptions you’ve heard about programming from people not familiar with it? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago by gianni@lemmy.ml to c/programming@programming.dev

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As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren't as familiar with it. It doesn't happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do.

I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences. So, I thought it would be interesting to ask.

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[–] themusicman@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

We must do different sorts of programming...

[–] huginn@feddit.it 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There's a wide variety of types of programming. It's nice that the core concepts can carry across between the disparate branches.

If I'm doing a particular custom view I'll end up using sin cos tan for some basic trig but that's about as complex as any mobile CRUD app gets.

I'm sure there are some math heavy mobile apps but they're the exception that proves the rule.

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You should probably use matrices rather than trig for view transformations. (If your platform supports it and has a decent set of matrix helper functions.) It’ll be easier to code and more performant in most cases.

[–] huginn@feddit.it 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I mean I'm not sure how to use matrices to draw the path of 5 out of 6 sides of a hexagon given a specific center point but there are some surprisingly basic shapes that don't exist in Android view libraries.

I'll also note that this was years ago before android had all this nice composable view architecture.

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Hah, yeah a hexagon is a weird case. In my experience, devs talking about “math in a custom view” has always meant simply “I want to render some arbitrary stuff in its own coordinate system.” Sorry my assumption was too far. 😉

[–] huginn@feddit.it 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah it was a weird ask to be fair.

Thankfully android lets you calculate those views separately from the draw calls so all that math was contained to measurement calls rather than calculated on draw.