Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25277566
What is an example of "plain-text code", or of someone fainting at the sight of it?
The Java® Language Specification explains that "Programs are written in Unicode", which can reasonably be described as "Plain Text", but I would be surprised to see someone fainting at the sight of one.
*except JavaScript
If programming languages are made for humans, then explain Assembly. Or better yet, try debugging a segfault in C at 3 AM and tell me that was designed with human comfort in mind.
Sure, some languages pretend to be human-friendly (looking at you, Python), but then you hit regex or dependency hell, and suddenly it’s like deciphering alien hieroglyphs. Let’s not even start on Lisp—parentheses everywhere like it’s trying to smother you in syntax.
No, programming languages aren’t made for humans—they’re made for machines, and we’re just the poor fools trying to survive the translation layer.
add t0, t1, t2 is way easier for humans than the 0x014B4820 that it could be assembled into, and what programmers had to use before assembly existed.
it was a joke bro lol no one want to do regex at 3am
Ah, I see where you’re coming from—my earlier post was meant as humor, but I might have leaned too hard into the sarcasm. No offense intended!
To clarify, there are languages and tools designed with machines in mind. Assembly is the classic example, but let’s not forget LLVM. It’s not a language per se, but an intermediate representation that optimizes code for machine execution. It’s like the ultimate translator between human-written code and raw machine instructions.
Still, regex at 3 AM? That’s a universal nightmare no matter what abstraction you’re working with.
i prefer c than python tbh. When I write a c application, it keeps working. When I write a python script, it rots and rarely lasts a year before I have to stop whatever else I'm doing and dive back into the python code to get it working again
The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).
The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:
I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey
(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog...)
some languages are however made to be anti-human, looking at you brainfuck and whitespace
Brainfuck is genuinely a fun toy language, and not that hard to use (for fairly simple stuff anyway). For really anti-human check out malbgolge 🫣
Those are arguably the most “made for humans” languages—they’re made to make humans laugh and/or headbutt a railroad spike in frustration
Well so is torture
They're not humans, they're programmers.
To be fair, they share 98% of their DNA with humans.
So do bananas
You mean they've adapted? Learned to copy our DNA?
bytecode and IL enter the chat
To be a pedantic dick, those aren't really programming languages. Their purpose isn't for writing at that level.
oh shit
Machine codes are not programming language.
That's a very Earth-centric assumption
You should have tried programming a 68000 about 40 years ago. I dreamed in binary for the duration of that class.
Adding to what others in thread have said, there are languages that are more usable and are more user-centric.
SFW edit: There are automatic transmission cars and manual transmission cars, both made for humans, one easier than the other. There are calculators that can compute lots of values and mental math classes, both for humans, one easier than the other. Ergonomics matter.
Although I do concede that, depending on the context, knowing more about something is better than not. I wonder what happened to the original meme's author for them to create the meme.
? VB
Inline some assembly and delete this