• Virginia Nutu (google)

    Frist prize I guess they wanted to do the right thing and use objects instead of static properties. Then they got bored in the middle of it and decided it's too much trouble to hook up the right values with the right objects.

  • Dmytro Polovinkin (unregistered)

    You can pass Runnable as if you were passing a function. It is not necessary to assume that it will be ran it in its own thread.

  • Supersonic Tumbleweed (unregistered)

    typo: aand

  • garbage day (unregistered)

    lol, also if my ancestral memory of Android 2.3 serves me right, this is twice as messed up. In Android, Activities are basically screens with widgets and stuff, which you only instantiate in your Android manifest file (good old boring XML). The fact that they create a new screen inside a Runnable, just to set a static property, really makes you think.

  • bvs23bkv33 (unregistered)

    if there are phones with two sim-slots, there also can be phones with two GPS modules each modifying lat and lon

  • (nodebb)

    We see a lot of that at my job. Lots of very smart scientists who not only don't know how programming works, but don't care to learn anything outside their fields of research.

  • Kyle Hutson (google)

    As a sysadmin in for a research computing facility, "scientists write code. It’s often not very good code" is the biggest understatement I've seen on this site. And yes, I've been reading this site for several years. Scientific code is, generally speaking, horrific.

  • Mr. Nojustice (unregistered)

    What causes a comment to be "held for moderation"?

  • (nodebb) in reply to Mr. Nojustice

    What rhymes with eggs & ham?

  • (nodebb)

    Looks pretty good for academic code.

  • Mr. Nojustice (unregistered) in reply to gleemonk

    "What rhymes with eggs & ham?"

    Negatory in my case, gleemonk. Had one held yesterday. Unless there is a secret rule that one can only post once per day...

  • Carl Witthoft (google) in reply to gleemonk

    ummmm.... 'I do not like them, Sam-I-AM" ?

  • 🤷 (unregistered) in reply to gleemonk

    Easy: "Flags & Ma'am".

  • Filippo (unregistered)

    How about they were trying not to write MainActivity every time for 70 times? Still bad... but understandable...

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Engineers are smarter than anyone else. So why hire some application developer to help you build an app?

  • jerepp (unregistered)

    Ah physics, I remember when I did my undergrad degree you had the choice to learn COBOL or FORTRAN run through MTS on some VAX in the basement... all programming languages were in caps then. COBOL was the wrong choice as all the profs expected any analysis to be done in FORTRAN and had no idea what the heck any COBOL code was trying to do, but you had the option so you could mess up 4 years of your life by simply not knowing when you signed up for classes in first year. Anyway not surprised by the learn anything not FORTRAN (and frankly 99% of their FORTRAN) via passed down code examples... just think that JAVA is bad enough but I am guessing the core of all their FORTRAN was written in 50s to run on some god-cursed babbage engine and 'tweeked' ever since.

  • David (unregistered)

    “Here, Researcher N learns to program by asking Researcher N–1 for their code, learning from it and tweaking what they had.”

    Reminds me of something I saw on IEEE Spectrum the other day: https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/Mjk3NTg0NQ.png

  • NoSpammer (unregistered) in reply to Mr. Nojustice

    Giving the algorithm for spam detection in detail here would kind of defeat the defense, don't you think?

    I am wondering: why isn't that reCAPTCHA enough to ward off spam?

  • (nodebb) in reply to gleemonk

    Legs of Lamb?

  • erlando (unregistered)

    As an Android developer let me just state that this is not even wrong.

  • (nodebb) in reply to WTF

    Push the pram?

  • siciac (unregistered) in reply to jkshapiro

    Alakazam?

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered)

    The programming module on the third year of my (in)Civil Engineering degree consisted of the (inebriated from 9am) Maths professor wobbling to the front of class and saying "Right! This year we need to learn C. Remember last year's Fortran 77 project? just go to the library and grab a book on how to convert a bit of Fortran code to C, do that, print off a screenshot showing it compiled and I'll give you last year's mark. "

    He forgot to add "Carry the resulting bit of code round with you for the rest of your life as every single program you ever write will use this one as the basis, just tweaked for today's needs. "

  • Decius (unregistered)

    Engineers aren't programmers. The typical structural engineer should be expected to program javascript about as well as a typical programmer estimates structural loads.

  • (nodebb)

    Many many years ago, I interviewed at a company that made molecular modelling software. The programming staff were all physicists with compilers, and they had some ... bad ... habits. I was not (and still am not) a physicist, but they were looking for a programmer with a physics textbook (maybe) rather than yet another physicist.

    In the end, (maybe sadly, maybe not) it didn't come off, since there was a delay with no response (the interviewers' boss was out of the country so couldn't do anything about their wish to take it further), then the recruiter told me, "They just told me that they had looked at some other CVs and decided not to go with me." Um. What? A few weeks later, the poor guy(1) called me back to see if I would be willing to pick it up again with them. Not a chance, partly because I had already accepted another offer, and partly because, well, "some other CVs" and not wanting to be a football kicked around in office politics.

    (1) Really. Sure, he's a recruiter, but it was grossly unfair asking him to pass on that message, then asking him to pass on a message a few weeks later saying that there had been some internal infighting and as a result the opportunity was open again. He must have known what I'd say - he certainly didn't sound surprised - and he must have told them what he thought before he called.

  • (nodebb)

    When I was a computer science student in the early 1990's, two of my co-op terms were with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation. Answering to the same manager (who was actually one of the better ones I have had over the years) were a bunch of civil engineers and myself; for my first term there, we had another CS co-op student too. I was mostly writing the graphical interface for the application in C++/XWindows on HP-UX, while the engineers (all fully licensed) were writing the engineering code in FORTRAN. In the school term between my two co-op stints there, I had a FORTRAN class (concentrating on numerical analysis), so during my second term, I spent a good chunk of my second term debugging, cleaning up and even refactoring the code written by the engineers, once I understood what they trying to do.

    I had just learned the language, and I was writing better code than the engineers who had been doing it for years. Mind you, I had been actually programming for 10 years by then, but does Commodore 64 Basic really count?

  • Some Guy (unregistered) in reply to bvs23bkv33

    Here, Researcher N learns to program by asking Researcher N–1 for their code, learning from it and tweaking what they had.

    Funny, because this seems to almost exactly describe 'telephone', but with software.

  • (nodebb)

    thanks for info

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