• (disco)

    Frist!

    Wait, who's phil? That's new.

  • (disco) in reply to rc4
    rc4:
    Wait, who's phil? That's new.

    Phil is a grumpy troll, sysadmin developer reliability engineer devopsy something-or-other.

  • (disco) in reply to Fox

    Oh, thank you. The medium gray on light gray was too much for my eyes.

  • (disco)

    You know, I built a tool called TrickleDown that can do exactly this, though without nearly as much hand-holding manual coding as this. Instead, the manual specifications are written right there in the Excel sheet itself! :tropical_fish:

  • (disco) in reply to rc4
    rc4:
    Wait, who's phil?

    Someone who hasn't quite managed to get the ordering of paragraphs right. Yes, it puts the WTF at the end, but it really messes up the temporal ordering of the code snippets in order to do this.

    I also don't entirely understand the significance of either code. As this means I don't know SAP, this makes me happier.

  • (disco)

    So TRWTF is the hardwired filename here, yeah?

    libname quote excel "\network\share\folder\file1.xls";

  • (disco)
  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    I also don't entirely understand the significance of either code. As this means I don't know SAP, this makes me happier.

    SAP != SAS

    And yes, you should be happy. I actually had to learn that "language" in university (don't ask why). It's beyond horrible. I'm seriously considering getting drunk right now because I was reminded of it.

  • (disco) in reply to asdf
    asdf:
    I actually had to learn that "language" in university

    :wave:

  • (disco) in reply to asdf
    asdf:
    I actually had to learn that "language" in university (don't ask why).

    Yeah, one can wonder why they're called "universities" and not "concentration camps for programmers".

    INB4 pedantic dickweedery: yeah, I know there are other courses than CS.

    Here, have a :cookie:. You deserve one.

  • (disco) in reply to kt_
    kt_:
    INB4 pedantic dickweedery: yeah, I know there are other courses than CS.

    It was not a CS course, but it didn't have anything to do statistical analysis either. The professor found it "helpful" to teach us SAS nonetheless. Half of the exam was supposed to be about SAS (although the course description didn't even mention it!), so I tried my best to teach myself that crap. Then I wrote the exam, and not a single question in there was about SAS.

    So not only did I have to learn a horrible, useless language in university that no CS student should ever touch, but because I believed the professor and spent quite some time on learning it, I also got a worse grade.

  • (disco) in reply to asdf

    We had SAS as part of a statistical course. It had SAS on the exam as well. On paper. :facepalm:

  • (disco) in reply to Luhmann

    Well my C course had a paper exam. And yes points were deducted for not having a clear enough semicolon at the end of each line.

  • (disco) in reply to Dlareg

    I had to grade exams for a Verilog class that required students to write code on paper. I felt really bad docking points when they got stupid stuff wrong like forgetting a semicolon. Hell, I've been writing Verilog professionally for over 15 years and even I screw up syntax every day. I mean, the compiler/IDE/etc is supposed to help with that stuff, why punish students for no good reason?

  • (disco) in reply to NedFodder
    NedFodder:
    why punish students for no good reason?

    :airquotes: Education :airquotes:

  • (disco) in reply to NedFodder

    It was even worse. My semicolon ( ; )was not clear enough and looked too much as a normal colon ( : ).

  • (disco) in reply to asdf
    asdf:
    And yes, you should be happy. I actually had to learn that "language" in university (don't ask why).

    I actually learned it in Computer Science 3 in High School. I learned enough to take an official certification test (which was extremely easy) and I got my SAS certification, after which I promptly forgot everything I knew.

  • (disco) in reply to Dlareg
    Dlareg:
    And yes points were deducted for not having a clear enough semicolon at the end of each line.

    Happened to me a few times, and it's just stupid. One of our exams (in which we had to write C, Prolog, Haskell and Scala on paper) was an exception, though: If the syntax was close enough and you could explain what you wrote to the professor immediately upon request, you would still get full points.

  • (disco) in reply to NedFodder
    NedFodder:
    Verilog
    Since when do `begin`/`end` blocks look like C? SystemVerilog, yes, the OO part of the language uses C/C++-like syntax, but Verilog looks more like Pascal than C.
  • (disco)

    @asdf, @Luhmann On the plus side then, everything else was downhill...

  • (disco) in reply to Dlareg
    Dlareg:
    It was even worse. My semicolon ( ; )was not clear enough and looked too much as a normal colon ( : ).

    Sometimes my compiler gets confused too. When it had too much to drink the previous night, the bits 00111011 just look too much like 00111010.

  • (disco) in reply to asdf
    asdf:
    SAP != SAS

    https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/77/09/9e/77099e99060209eda33a58858fd7b962.jpg

  • (disco) in reply to dkf

    But you can query SAP with SAS ...

  • (disco) in reply to aliceif

    What Jill did not expect as the first question from Mike, when she went over, was an inquiry into just what the bureaucracy would be like, to bite the bullet immediately. Humoring him with an explanation, she was somewhat more taken aback when, after only brief cussing, he started pulling up the forms to do so.

    Umm.... :wtf: Are those words supposed to mean something?

  • (disco) in reply to aliceif
    aliceif:
    But you can query SAP with SAS

    I guess there are a million ways to lose your sanity

  • (disco) in reply to brianw13a
    brianw13a:
    Are those words supposed to mean something?

    Translation:

    Jill was surprised that the first thing Mike asked was how to do the thing he had been told was off-limits (changing how the calculations were performed). When she explained the bureaucratic red tape necessary to do this, she was even more surprised when he immediately began filling out the forms to do so.

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek

    Ah, I see. I would never have guessed that.

    That write up is every bit as WTFy as the technical part.

  • (disco) in reply to Dlareg
    Dlareg:
    Well my C course had a paper exam. And yes points were deducted for not having a clear enough semicolon at the end of each line.

    we had this in my university as well...

    you know how i solved that issue?

    i went down to the local pawn shop, bought an old manual typewriter for $20, spend a few hours fishing out all the cathair from the internals, oiling it up, and adapting a ink tape cartridge for a calculator to fit and brought that thing to the exam.

    show me where in the university rules it said* i can't bring a mechanical typewriter to my exams!

    * make sure you get a copy of the rules from before 2008. they changed the rules in 2008 because some bitch brought a mechanical typewriter to all her finals in 2007

  • (disco)

    SAS is not a bad language, it's just taught that way.

    Really, most SAS programs are written by statisticians or analysts whose goal is to get something out the door as quickly as possible. So you'll see the same kinds of poor programming practices that you'll see in any other programming language used by people who have never taken a good CD class and never had to write and maintain a "production" program.

    That said:

    • The short three line program doesn't do all the things the long program does. It does step 1 and maybe parts of steps 2 and 3 (with no documentation, there's no way to tell just by looking at the program). It definitely doesn't do steps 4 and 5.

    • The excel libname function is relatively new. The old program might have been written when DDE was the only choice. Now there are much better ways.

    • There's a tendency for new SAS programmers to go overboard with the SAS macro language (those things that start with percent and ampersand), just because it's there. It's often not necessary.

  • (disco) in reply to brianw13a
    brianw13a:
    That write up is every bit as WTFy as the technical part.
    Seriously? Yes, the paragraph might benefit from a bit of editing, but the meaning was clear to me the first time I read it.

    (Could be that’s because I have a tendency to write run-on sentences with too many clauses myself, of course.)

  • (disco) in reply to Gurth
    Gurth:
    Yes, the paragraph might benefit from a bit of editing, but the meaning was clear to me the first time I read it.
    I'm no English Professor by any stretch and it's only my opinion.
  • (disco) in reply to Luhmann
    Luhmann:
    :wave:
    A teapot broadcasting wifi?
  • (disco) 
    %mend;

    It's nice when a language has FIXME annotations built into the syntax.

  • (disco) in reply to Zylon
    Zylon:
    A teapot broadcasting wifi?

    Giving your RFC 2324 compliant kettle an ethernet connection is bit unnecessary these days, no? Just hook it up to the home Wi-Fi and avoid cluttering up more of your house with unneeded cables. More portable, too.

  • (disco) in reply to asdf
    asdf:
    SAP != SAS

    != SSAS != SSDS... Damn, are we running out of acronyms?

  • (disco) in reply to Maciejasjmj

    You forgot SSMS

  • (disco) in reply to aliceif
    aliceif:
    You forgot SSMS

    And SaaS.

  • (disco) in reply to HardwareGeek

    And SSDs.

  • Axel (unregistered)

    That 3rd paragraph was the WORST writing I have ever seen on this site. "Tasked with a task" was as nothing compared to that ball of random-phrase mud. I had to reread it six times to figure out WTF it meant. Glad I wasn't the only one who had trouble with it.

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