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Admin
For shame, the power of Bruce Said So was not with this one....
Filed under: Wait until upper management hears about this!
Admin
At least the flow chart was colored...
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Good lord, please tell me that's a joke? Nobody can be so stupid as to think that human languages and programming languages aren't at all different/processed differently, right? :facepalm:
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I have no idea, it's just an old article I found years ago. Everyone I show it to seems to agree it's total nonsense. The comments section is good fun to read if you have a horizontal scroll wheel on your mouse...
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Though I would be interested if someone actually built a natural language highlighter for common communications. It might help all of those grammar Notsies in their quest for concise communications!
Filed under: Let's see, red for nouns, blue for verbs, green for adjectives, purple for adverbs...
Admin
That shit made me angrier than the article content. Also, I checked the offensive content box, but couldn't find anything interesting.
Admin
Sounds about right.
Programming languages that make it easy for non-programmers to write programs result in badly-written programs. Unfortunately a non-programmer does not understand that his program is badly-written.
And these graphical tools are all very well, but they can be difficult to learn and are rarely an adequate substitute for the real thing.
I had the opportunity to play with a process flow tool called Pentaho once. That was fun.
Admin
"But the money was good, so Bruce kept coming into work."
It's a joke!
Programmers always get "good money". Using obsolete technology ruin their knowledge and career. Why would they do that?
Admin
In high school I once used a program called FlowPro - it actually took your program flow chart and generated a C source file that used labels and
gotos to jump from each block to the other. The only reason I know that is because it had a bug that my teacher didn't believe existed, so I looked at the generated source code and sure enough some code that needed to be executed was unreachable do to an unconditionalgoto.Admin
BEHOLD! A RETURN TO THE 80S!!!!! https://www.pilz.com/imperia/md/images/import/International/020_Solutions/015_PSS4000/G-software-800.jpg
Admin
Graphical programming language?
......
IT BURNS US! IT BURNS US! GODDESS HAVE MERCY!!!!!!!
[image]runs away crying
Admin
Have to admit, they've got a point about it making it harder to read code without, or with a different color scheme: My color scheme for C# makes use of the fact Visual Studio's highlighting differentiates the kinds of types (class, value type, enum etc.) by adding an ugly highlighting to various ones; and I can be a bit lost whenever I'm on a colleague's computer, and I can't see at first glance that, say, some type is a
struct.Admin
Sounds to me like Dual Helix was a precursor to something like DTS packages in SQLServer. Those did not support loops directly but some of my then colleagues at the time realized they could use the ActiveX object with a couple lines vbscript in it to 'adjust' the step the DTS package was on. Suddenly people were 'writing' DTS packages rather than stored procs to do not just ETL but all kids of 'domestic' data transformations, under the theory this was going to be easier for new people to come in and understand.. yea right...
Needless to say these DTS diagrams got huge to the point no screen resolution was sufficient to see enough of it at any given time to understand what was happening. Then some people faced with more complex logic would do things like set variables in the ActiveX objects so that a branch could have side effects down the line. It did not take long before nothing was reusable and only the original author really knew what any DTS job did without spending a day bushwhacking thru it.
Programming by dragging boxes and arrows around has never worked but someone feels compelled to try it every decade or so. The notable exception being ladder logic for industrial controllers but that domain might be unique in that the complexity of logic to implement is limited by the physical instruments being controlled.
Still I think an important element of the story here is that Dual Helix might not have been a total WTF. The bosses refusal to read or obey the documentation and practice any kind of normalization is a recipe for failure with just about any database technology. Kinda like my DTS package example, they were good an useful, Microsoft did not include loops for a reason it was not supposed to be a Turing complete implementation language. The fact that 'we' found a way around that problem by modifying the 'program counter' kicked open the door to real WTFery.
Admin
Having a car makes it harder to use public transportation e.g. when my car is being serviced. Clearly the solution is not having a car in the first place.
Admin
FTFY<g>
Admin
This reminds me of a horrible ecommerce system I had to use for a few months called Demandware. Among its other dozen or so horrible proprietary languages you had to learn, one of them was a flowchart-y visual language that made me wonder if they were in cahoots with the hard liquor industry.
Admin
Blueprints!! :laughing:
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Ugh. BlueJ was bad enough:
[image]At least you could write Java code underneath in a pinch!
Admin
Ah, LabView. Allowing Electrical Engineers to pretend to do what they want to be doing when they have to be programmers since 1986.
Admin
Labview is useful if you never want a custom block and never have more than 10 ops in your program.
I dealt with Labview lovers for a few years -- good luck debugging a picture that's uncommentable, unzoomable, has those damnable "movie frame" flip-switch pages... it still hurts to think about it.
Admin
as have I.
Of course my interaction is limited to:
Admin
I worked with LabView in my high school Digital Electronics class. I got bored with it and challenged myself to make working 4-function calculator in it. It took a week.
Admin
Oh shoot, my LabView certification is expiring this month...
Filed under: Should I renew? Decisions decisions...
Admin
:tada:
:no_good:Admin
Huh, you must not have had a lot of time to do it, or you were using only Basic components...?
Admin
Well we had 50 minute class periods and I had to complete my other work first, plus I had to learn LabView on the fly. I was probably also doing it wrong, but if the most intuitive way I could find to do something is the wrong way, that says more about the language than anything else.
Admin
Ah. Short time spans are a :barrier: to productivity. Also, I suppose it depends on the type of calculator you were making. If it was in the form of a 2-input box with a toggle switchboard, that can be done in maybe half an hour. If you emulated a keypad (with buttons) with display, that would need significantly more components and wiring...
Filed under: Damn, wish my class work took had a better naming scheme. Was it Exercise 6v1 that was the Weather Control project?
Admin
Praise the Helix Fossil!
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It was the keypad with buttons - pressing the buttons actually multiplied the input box by 10 and added the selected digit to it, and then there was the issue of storing the previous input and the operation to be performed when pressing =. String manipulation looked too challenging to figure out in the limited time I had.
I've been looking through my archived files but I fear I may not have kept it - oh well. Not like I could open it, but I could upload it for you all to see.
Admin
Ah, definitely the long way then. Congrats on making it work though! I think my calculator program was actually built on a demo board in C (somewhat unrelated class in a different semester), so I know how annoying it can be.
If you have the .VI files I can get them rendered (if anyone's actually interested). It's probably nowhere near as complex as the one @accalia posted though....
Admin
Hey now, one of the reasons I come to TDWTF is to avoid LabVIEW...you guys aren't helping my sanity!
Admin
FTFY
Admin
Wait, you mean to tell me you didn't even MAKE that?
Filed under: For shame, that Rube Goldberg machine is pretty impressive for a TV Channel Changer...
Admin
Admin
You were using LabView, so yes…
Admin
To be fair, LabView can indeed make a pretty good emulated virtual calculator, if you have enough time and energy to spend on it.
Admin
Look, loads of different programming languages can do that. It's usually regarded as being a beginners' exercise.
Admin
My only experience with "graphical programming" was Oracle Application Express and it will also be my last.
Admin
luser.Did this with Lego Mindstorms. Would also not do it again. Inter-RCX networking is a :barrier: to sanity.
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Graphical programming is hard to do well; god knows, I've tried to write graphical programming systems a few times now. The biggest problem (IME) is that it's not great at managing burgeoning complexity well; text with named subprograms (procedures, functions, classes, methods, whatever…) seems to cope better.
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I feel like event-grid interfaces work pretty well, such as with Construct and ClickTeam Fusion. Considering that the construct devs used to be 3rd party devs for Fusion and they basically made the exact same product, clearly they thought Fusion did something right.
Admin
Oh. Wow. Just. Wow.
My eyes! My eyes!!!!! The goggles, they do nothing.
If that was how most programming worked, I would find another career for sure.
Admin
OK, then, a challenge: write a "2048" game in Labview (devilish grin).
DIsclaimer: I actually wrote an ASCII "2048" in R. It just prints the array of current values to the console. If anyone actually wants this horror, PM me or whatever it takes to get me your email address.... Or maybe I posted it to github/cellocgw ; I forget.
Admin
That's a lot prettier than the LabView I was forced to write about 8 years ago... that actually doesn't hurt that much to me :smirk:
I never bothered to learn to write it "properly".
Admin
Not very readable, is that LabView or some FPGA toolbox? How much I hated the former when I wanted to change a for-loop to a while-loop and had to re-wire so much crap, what in C is a single line of diff.
Seriously LabView should die in a Fiendfyre with marketing that still sells that crap to EE schools.
Admin
Apparently it is the editor for the PSS 4000.
Admin
Ah yes PLC, why I am not surprised.
Admin
As some of you know, there are a few special-purpose languages (HDLs) used for designing and verifying the logic of digital chips. I once used a GUI tool called Visual HDL that used flow chart-like constructs to generate the HDL code. Those of us who had to use it called it Visual Hurdle.
Admin
The fact that you're here strongly suggests that you're already beyond help.