Imagine someone sending one of these crawling in your house late at night...

@honey-the-codewitch said in Another mention of programming as fun (from Clean Code, 2nd ed):

In my experience if you do what you love for work, work can take the joy out of it, in some cases to the point where it ruins the enjoyment altogether. I think vacations are important, for that, among other reasons.

It's hard to disagree with that, based on my own story. Sure, it was fun at first, but there was a period of time where I would spend every waking moment working on code - my employer's, from 9 to 5, then as soon as 5pm rang, I switched to my personal project(s) until bedtime, and entire weekends were dedicated to them also. That was unsustainable and I should have realized that. I burned out.

These days it's extremely rare I spend any time at all coding for myself, unless I have something very small and specific. But I keep coming up with new ideas, write them down, and as far as I'm concerned, this is what's going to occupy my time when I retire. Because I still do love to code. But I can no longer code for work + code in my spare time.

Compared to Y2K or 2038, an OS that no longer gets support is a complete non-event (IMNSHO). Even if it's the most popular of MS's Windows versions still out there.

I still have a few machines running Windows 7.

@OriginalGriff said in "Worst UI" competition.:

It's been done: programmers were asked to crete the worst volume control

OK, I LOLed at the bicycle pump.

"Is water free?"
"yes"
"I'll take a million gallons please".

When I started my career in the mid-90s, I thought I'd try to learn everything there is to know about Windows development. It didn't take too long before I smartened up and realized it's an impossible task as the goalposts keep moving. Today with web development, and multiplatform targets, it's even worse - much worse.

My approach these days is, learn what's directly applicable to what you're developing, and don't worry about the rest. But I still burned out. I still love to code, but it's been years since I wrote any hobby type of side-project for myself in my own time that's anything above the scale of "small utility".

Personally I never fully got the hang of cmd.exe's (or even DOS's) quirks and generally shy away from batch file-type of syntax.

When PowerShell came along I figured there was no point in trying to learn cmd.exe's idiosyncrasies.

PS isn't without its own quirks, but at least in most cases, if I sit back and think about them, I end up agreeing they make sense and move on.

And PS is a lot more powerful. And if that's not enough, you can tap into .NET.

@PIEBALDconsult said in And then DOS was released:

Windows 95, PTUI. Never really used it. When I had a system with it installed I wiped it and installed DOS and Win 3.

Say what you will about it, it was one of the big moments in computing history. Notice how didn't say "great"--I said "big".

Even though home computers had existed long before that moment, this is when it was no longer solely the domain of the obsessed and loner nerds, and when the average Joe realized he should probably get on the bandwagon.

And then that lasted until smartphones came around. For better or worse. But that's a discussion for another day.

It almost sounds like someone actually went out of his way to train an AI specifically using your postings.

@realJSOP said in We need the CCC back:

If re-implemented, I think it needs its own forum because it really clutters up the lounge.

This. Let's not allow this to degenerate again.

Well, I tend to move the entire content of my mailbox to a local PST every couple of months until there's nothing left.

Besides, I thought the claim was that all free email services did when deleting an email was to mark it as deleted and they still held it internally?

4 months refactoring code to support a newer version of a library.

That sounds so wrong, on so many levels.

I've started (barely) to dabble myself in React recently. Lots of WTF moments, where I just ended up pasting a few lines into ChatGPT and asking it what that's supposed to do...and particularly, explaining the syntax in a way that makes sense.

@Sander-Rossel said in Did Anyone Notice?:

your usual disturbing avatar.

Oh, goodie, it's not just me. I swear that thing has given me nightmares. :-)

(and, glad to see the CP lounge back in action. Although not in its former glory. Better than nothing however.) I haven't kept up to date - I can't imagine Chris, et al, are still around or even remotely involved with this current...incarnation?

Coming from DOS -> Win3.1 -> 95, I hated having stuff sent to the recycle bin, since whenever I saw the icon with papers in it, I had to obsessively follow up with the command to empty it. Every. Single. Time. The instant I realized Shift bypassed the recycle bin, I immediately started using it. Thanks, Windows 95. Can you believe that was nearly 30 years ago already?

I've used ECHO OFF in many a batch file during my DOS days. Not only that, @ECHO OFF would also suppress the ECHO OFF command itself. It kept the output very clean...but ultimately (and this is probably what you're getting at) it doesn't belong in environments where you're debugging and want to see the output of everything. But once I got my batch files going, they would *all* start that way. I don't know why I was so obsessed with keeping the output to a minimum. Probably because I wrote batch files to automate things for non-technical people, and seeing *anything* at all would cause panic among them. I don't miss batch files. Despite its idiocratic syntax sins, I still like PowerShell.

Well, if the site has gathered enough of a following in Dutch only, I'm thinking word of mouth might be enough to increase his viewership, even if it happens more slowly than if he were to burn a big pile of money to advertise himself. I mean, developers network together. You just need a few people to mention they got their job through that site to their English-speaking friends, and it ought to snowball from there. Maybe I'm naive. I'm not a marketing guy.

I probably learned those combos before Ctrl-X/C/V and forgot all about them. One habit I can't break out of (and should) is that I hold down the Shift key when deleting files from Explorer so they immediately get deleted, as opposed to being sent to the recycle bin. And I regret the habit. It's extremely rare, but there have been a few occasions where I wished I could've just gone to the recycle bin to undo the delete. And no, Ctrl-Z can't undo a permanent file delete that was done with Shift-Del. Fortunately I tend to have backups.

OMG, I seriously thought I was the only one who took the habit of hitting Ctrl-C twice because every once in a while my first attempt seemed to get dropped...

That's a brilliant idea.

Sander Rossel wrote:

I think it's currently (one of) the biggest job board for .NET developers in the Netherlands.

And if only he spent a bit of money for a translator's services, it probably would only get much bigger still.