Comment on Fifty Years of the Personal Computer Operating System
oxomoxo@lemmy.world 6 months agoNot sure why you’re digging this hole, but okay… You claim to have 40 years experience, a retired software dev… BASIC has little relevance to the article OP posted… It doesn’t make much sense to post a hello world loop, further you can search for this loop and find thousand of syntax accurate examples, which any engineer would do normally, due to the PTSD of posting on public forums and being ripped to shreds for the most minor of typo…
Why would you claim to run two lines through a compiler to check it? I mean there are endless interpreters and plenty of IDEs that would have caught the mistake as well.
BASIC is a high level educational language to promote CS in the 80s and 90s, What does posting this here, and then misusing semi-colons, do to give you any credibility. Why not Lisp, COBOL or Fortran? Is it because your trying to steal credibility like Microsoft did? Make it make sense!
And finally what in the world is this CC signature. Your on Lemmy, the not-for-profit decentralized forum. Creative Commons licensing is for scenarios that involve commerce. Everything anyone posts here is free to use because there really is no way to enforce copyright on content where the owner cannot be identified and no single entity owns the federation. Unless Cosmic Cleric is your legal name…
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Agree on the relevance, disagree on the makes much sense. I posted it as a comedic post, not a serious one (what the kids these days call a “shit post”).
Except when they are lazy to do so, or are waiting at LAX to pick someone up and they’re quickly browsing Lemmy while watching for departing passengers.
You’re being too literal in an attempt to win an Internet argument. My point was that I can’t remember every last syntax for every language I’ve ever learned, through forty years, so I let the compiler tell me when I’ve forgotten something or got something all. That’s the only point I was making, that I let the compiler assist me in remembering syntax when I forget it.
Yes, and what I just said for compiler was also meant for the IDE. Way back in the day we had character based text editors and we used compilers for error output, there were no IDEs. But Throughout my career I used both the IDE and compiler to assist me in remembering syntax. I’ve also been known to use a javadoc lookup or a search through online sources to remember things as well.
Again, I posted it as a humorous comment, not serious, and I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition (/queueMontyPython) by someone who wants to prove themselves against someone else. It was just meant as a joke, that’s all.
I don’t know Lisp or Fortran, and a tiny bit COBOL (I just missed having to work with punch cards, etc.). I know BASIC, Java, C# LUA, AM (propriertary 4GL), PowerBuilder, QuickBASIC, Apple Basic (still miss my Apple II+ sometimes).
And go through my commenting history, it’ll attest to my profession (if you’re being intellectually honest about deciding what you read).
I stand by what I’ve said in each and every comment.
I’ve already posted enough comments about that just today. If you really want an answer to that question, go search through my comments for today. I would just add to what you read that at at this point I have a morbid curiosity about all the people getting bent out of shape over me adding that link, its interesting the responses I’m getting to them.
We done? We’re both wasting too much time for me just admiting publically that I was just trying to do a joke comment and forgot the correct syntax that I had not used in decades, while commenting from a cell phone, doom scrolling, at a public place, while keeping an eye out for someone to arrive.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
oxomoxo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yikes, ok I can buy the shit posting. I think it’s fair to say it didn’t go over well. Most of the Lemmy user base is your age, who remember the dial-up days of the Internets. Most of us grew up with the Trash 80 and C64s and Apples in the classroom, which is why we are drawn to the Fediverse. So don’t be surprised when you get brigaded over a BASIC syntax error, because from our perspective it came across like a 22 year old who was pretending to know what the old days were like, and making an irrelevant comment on a post about a rather tragic part of computing history. Fair enough, we done.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Appreciate the pull back. Sincerely don’t mean to continue the argument, but I gotta just say this last one thing, just because feeling a little beat up here on Lemmy, again …
You know, instead of just assuming negatively, you could have taken what I said at face value, instead of double-downing on your attack. You publically called me out as a liar on a public forum, without even having done one Internet search yourself on my name, though you chastised me on not donig a search myself. That’s pretty severe to do to another human being at an online social gathering.
It doesn’t do well for Lemmy if nobody wants to ever comment on anything, especially if they make a simple mistake while doing so, because they’ll get ripped apart by others, the same others who would probably wonder later why there’s not enough posts/comments activity. People’s default mode is negative here, and we’re supposed to be building a more friendlier than Reddit place here.
On top of that, someone else had replied about an error code because of the semi-colons, and I had replied back with a joke reply about the compiler accepting it (joke being BASIC is interpreted), so I was hoping that would have been enough to signal comedy (even if bad comedy) and make this a non-situation.
You know, the real irony is, when I couldn’t remember to keep or remove the semi-colons (I really did take ten seconds to try and remember, and then get pissed off at myself for getting old), I finally thought “Fuck it, I’ll leave them in”, as I’d figure that they’d augment the comedic shit-postiness even more, as well as my previous statement of not wanting to take the time to search as I was busy looking for someone.
I remember my Apple 300 baud modem well, and dialing into many BBS. Also, CompuServe (never tried Prodigy though). And of course we all did AOL.
Anyway, I’m done/exhausted, and now I’ve had to defend my programming views on both a certain video searching technique, as well as BASIC coding (and as well as the Falklands Islands). Lemmy is a fucking tough place to socialize at. 😜
whoreticulture@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
lmao no you had a crazy overreaction to seeing a syntax error in a joke post
oxomoxo@lemmy.world 6 months ago
My response to the syntax error was a joke. Which is why it’s formatted as a console log error. I didn’t think much of it, other than I didn’t understand why it was relevant to OPs post. Then he responded to my comment with some sillyness about running it through a compiler, which further didn’t make sense. But I was like whatever… It was when he started saying that he’s too old to remember syntax and how hes been programming for forty years and all this reference his experience with old tech. It smelled of some juvenile attempt to pretend to be something he’s not. Which is why I commented about this not being the place to do that because Lemmy has a large population of folks that could easily see through this. At this point I was still pretty passive and didn’t think much of it.
It’s when he wrote the whole I’m too old to remember syntax from all the programming hes been doing for 40 years since his days on blah blah. This is when I called him out.
So he responds about his tough day, and how it was just a shit post joke and I said fine, fair enough, we all have bad days. I was willing to put it to bed and call it.
Finally he writes this wall of text about, despite being on the internet since it inception, how people on Lemmy are being so mean to him and how I could just think more positively and on and on. Yeah I over reacted to improper syntax, that’s it…