l3mming

If Snowden can exfiltrate data from the NSA, there is simply no way for your average employer to prevent this through computer restrictions. Effort in that direction is a total waste of money.

This is a company policy issue, enforced through non-disclosure agreements and, ultimately, the legal system.

Agreed. I manage both of these transparently beyond the employee's view. All the employee knows is that they have xyz free space to use on their profile.

Would this locked-down distro be used by customers or by employees? If it is being used by employees, there is no faster way to be hated than putting unnecessary restrictions on their logins. You don't want that kind of workplace.

I simply do this:

1. Make sure they don't get sudo/root privileges.

2. Remote mount their home directories (nfs).

3. Don't add any restrictions beyond that. It is a waste of time and money.

4. Control the rest through company policy, usually clauses under the 'Misuse of company network' section.

5. Who cares if employees are browsing tik-tok or whatever if they've done all their work? That's a work-allocation issue. If they haven't done all their work then that's already a solved problem. Either motivate them or performance manage them slowly towards the door.

6. Who cares if they want to install xyz software [in their home directory]? Chances are it'll be a free boost for performance and/or morale.

Vim. Hands down the best text editor / ide ever created. Come at me, Emacs.

Yes, you should. Try something debian based like Mint. Hell, try Arch, which I use btw.

Yeah, I'm conflicted too. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, fuck IBM.

It is that easy in php:

$jsonConfig = file_get_contents('config.json');
$config = json_decode($jsonConfig);

That's a very good question. Java and OOP really were new and exciting things when I first entered the workforce. But, I first started programming long before Uni and joining the workforce. I first started programming on one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision using an 'Intelliputer'. Then I learnt Logo on an Apple IIe. Then GW-BASIC on MSDOS, then PASCAL, then C. Then I stuck with C for a long time, including most of Uni.

So, by the time Java and OOP came along, I already had 10+ years of procedural programming behind me. That actually made it really difficult for me to to learn OOP. It was some weird paradigm that didn't align with anything I knew. So I gave Java a mostly wide berth for as long as I could and focused instead on Perl, then PHP.

Both of those ended up getting OOP abstractions crammed into them, so eventually I did end up learning OOP, but it was more through osmosis. By then Java had largely come and gone. As much as it saddens me, Perl too largely died. That left me with PHP which, to be fair, was becoming quite a nice language by then.

By now I was a devout OOP developer and really enjoyed the OOP changes to PHP. Python, being object based, was the next logical choice. Javascript was still a pile of poo. Then Javascript got OOP abstractions too and suddenly was all the rage. Then they started putting the frontend on the backend (Node) and I was truly lost at sea. To me it it was twice as much work to build something (API + frontend) compared to the old server side rendering. It seemed way to much effort just to avoid a page load.

Nevertheless, I tried React and I hated it, it made no sense - though Javascript was looking a lot nicer by then. So I held off a little longer on adding 'frontend dev' to my resume, then NuxtJS came along and here we are.

So, long story short, I've been doing this forever. I technically review team code all day, every day. I know good code, I know bad code and have seen shit that still gives me nightmares.

The funny thing is, I have written dozens of cool tools that I think are pretty damn clever, yet I have never open sourced anything. My reason is the same as yours: Because I still don't think any of it is good enough.

What a joy to see Sigur Rós' album '()' listed. :)

Curse you artists, and your whimsical disregard for parseability.

I'm a programmer of 25+ years. Everything written above is spot on. I too started with C and I still love that thing like my first born. It is so immensely satisfying writing something in C that a) works b) doesn't leak memory and c) passes all your unit tests. Nothing else compares.

I too looked at React and hated it with a passion. Then I saw VueJS and kind of liked it. Then I saw Nuxt and now I've gone all in on NuxtJS. It is so simple and well-thought out compared to the shambles that is React. It's very satisfying to use. Rust is next for me.

I've learnt well over 10 languages over the years. Some well, some well enough. Learning a language is bit like reading a book. If you're a third of the way in and it's doing nothing for you, don't waste your time. Grab another one off the shelf and try that. Don't put pressure on yourself - it should be enjoyable, not stressful. Just chip away at it bit by bit and enjoy the little discoveries.

Don't worry so much about your coding style. From the examples you gave, yours is much easier to follow than the second one. And, you know what? Most 'senior programmers' I've worked with have been bad coders. The bar is not as high as it may appear.

Sounds like you're currently a systems guy with a bit of programming skills. That's an awesome combination to have, and mirrors my own all those years ago. The best bit is your have the freedom to learn programming as a hobby, without the pressure. Enjoy the process. Watch some videos by Sebastian Lague on Youtube, they're magical.

Best of luck with your programming journey. It is an immensely enjoyable hobby, and ridiculously useful skill to have.

I like this. Super clean and simple.

That said, I suspect Reddit's 'controversial' sorting might work a little differently, as I often used it to see what the crazy people were saying.

I haven't played with the numbers, but I'm not sure that your proposal would push the crazies to the top - just the moderate crazies.

I was fortunate enough to meet Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP founder) long before I became a PHP programmer. At the height of the PHP hate back in the early 00's Rasumus was bravely giving a talk to a group of us stuck up Perl programmers.

To be fair, we had good reason. PHP had borrowed lots of functions from C for familiarity (all those str* functions) and done stupid things that made life unnecessarily difficult, like naming some of them with underscores and others without, and making parameter order inconsistent across similar functions. So it did all these C like things but, it did them way, way slower.

Not only that, PHP also wanted to be like Perl because perl was also a bit like C but, unlike PHP, did things quickly and could parse just about anything you could throw at it. So, PHP also shoe-horned in a bunch of regex functions to give perl-like capabilities to their pile of poo. So now it also had perl capabilities, but was performing way, way slower than perl.

PHP was like that try-hard kid at school that wanted to please everyone, but everyone pretended not to know.

But, on top of it all, Rasmus was very apologetic for what PHP had become. He said to us that PHP was never designed to be a programming language. It was designed to be a "Personal Home Page" templating tool. But soon people wanted to conditionally include bits of templates. Then they wanted to iteratively include bits of template.

And then he learned about lex and yacc, rewrote the whole thing. And finally, one stormy day, there it was. Hideously ugly and Turing complete.

And, when he said all this suddenly it all made sense and we had a whole lot of sympathy for where it and he was at.

He went on to say that they were putting a lot of working into looking at the worst bits of PHP and making things better. And, credit where credit's due, that's exactly what he's done. PHP today really is a nice language to work with.