What does /prog/ consider to be the ideal job? Getting paid to write in Scheme? Assembly language? Making device drivers?
I don't really care as long as you don't say web and mobile ``apps''.
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Anonymous2013-10-01 11:40
I actually wouldn't like being paid to write in Scheme. I feel an ENTERPRISE Scheme environment would be awful. Especially due to the fragmentation between implementations.
Making drivers, reverse engineering, writing software for embedded systems (in C / Assembly), maybe working on interesting problems in things like AI.
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Anonymous2013-10-01 13:57
Chief system administrator at an ISP, whether you own it or not. You have the freedom to do whatever you like, and have enough free time to work on the many software projects out there. And because you are the Chief, you can set up some clusters for repos and testing, and have the F.L.O.S.S. community work it. It's great for marketing too, saying "This ISP supports these F.L.O.S.S. project, and is committed to the improving of today's communication and technology." I can keep talking about my dream job, but you can pretty much daydream all the perks it comes with.
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Anonymous2013-10-01 14:04
Writing strong AI driven, self-modifying GPU drivers in AMD64 machine code.
Network administration. Pays well and easy in most cases, because it's always lazy mid-sized companies hiring you to block Facebook and maybe set up a firewall.
No programming job can ever be perfect, because they all have deadlines to meet, and deadlines always imply shit code, quick hacks and some SYNERGISTIC PROJECT MANAGER calling you a nerd for not putting a Share on Reddit button on your rocking webapp.
To be perfectly honest, whenever I spend my free time programming I end up either
1) fixing shit that other people should have written correctly in the first place, then cursing at whatever stupid system they're using this week to replace emailing patches, or 2) writing roguelikes.
I really got into programming in the first place because when I was very young I would play rogue/hack, and they stood out to me over other programs because the complexity was what was shown to the user, as opposed to being used to hide internal operations from the user (i.e. mail programs, the entire operating system, etc). If I had the opportunity to, I would probably just become a less successful Toady, and try to make entertaining system simulations.
I don't think I could sustain even a meager lifestyle that way, though, so if I could I'd like to write device drivers, or perhaps get work as a kernel developer.
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Anonymous2013-10-07 16:03
>>13 Dwarf Fortress needs a good rewrite. As good and complex the game might be, the code is utter shit.
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Anonymous2013-10-07 16:06
>>14 When the time is right we should all get behind Rimjob, I mean Rimworld.
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Anonymous2013-10-07 16:40
>>14 Could you give examples? I've only seen a few statements from people who worked on the SDL interface, and I didn't hear any horror stories from them.
Or are you referring to the SDL bits themselves? I can well imagine that those are horrible hacky bits.
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Anonymous2013-10-07 16:50
>>16 I mean the core logic of the program. It's full of one-letter variables, no spaces around symbols, triple-nested fors and other disgusting shit.
The SDL bits fail rather often in some obscure distros as well.
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Anonymous2013-10-07 17:17
>>17 Oh, so just bad style. That's not really worthy of a rewrite, at worst just a pass through a beautifier and renaming variables if appropriate.
For your amusement: https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona . The punchline is that it follows a very rigid and well-defined coding standard that actually works for its purpose, which ``force the coder to understand exactly what a method does''.
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Anonymous2013-10-07 17:22
>>18 That is exactly the same style used in the original draft of the J interpreter.
I hate everything to do with that language family.