This is possibly one of the more cursed single sentences I've ever seen in a job posting
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sentences more appealing in a job description:
We're combining my foot and your crotch to translate kinetic energy into pain
We're combining pliers and your fingernails to ||redacted||
We're combining onions and belts to translate fashion into what was the style at the time
We're combining lotion and its skin to ensure customers don't get the hose again -
Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️replied to Asta [AMP] last edited by
@aud Yeah, you can basically encode arbitrary computation in the package version constraints.... it almost never comes up in practice. Almost.
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Asta [AMP]replied to Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ last edited by
@[email protected] ha ha suck on that algorithm
(once you pointed it out it was super obvious it was the halting problem just... you didn't literally say "lo, it is the halting problem", but I have no idea why that didn't occur to me before that?! gonna blame the headache and the election) -
@aud @CptSuperlative Famously stability is a low priority for applications running in COBOL.
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Asta [AMP]replied to Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ last edited by
@[email protected] uhh
sorry, wait, what?
You can do what in a fucking conda
jesus -
@[email protected] @[email protected] COBOL? co DEEZ ball. s. balls. in... your mainframe.
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Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️replied to Asta [AMP] last edited by
@aud It's a 3SAT reduction... The fact that you can have non-overlapping ranges of versions allowed gives you a lot of expressive power.
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Asta [AMP]replied to Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ last edited by
@[email protected] The more I learn about computing, the more I understand why @[email protected] has so many strong feelings about packaging.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] "COPILOT" but it's just a guy deeply into COBOL programming and aviation and he lives in a forested area and he hates programming but will happily call your code shit if you pay him enough to review it.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] "COPILOT, please write a for loop in java with proper documentation"
"dipshit money boy, I made love to your mother who was a vastly superior programmer to you. We bonded over what a fucking disappointment you are." -
Flatbush Gardener 🌈replied to Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ last edited by
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Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️replied to Flatbush Gardener 🌈 last edited by
@xris @aud I guess, but I wouldn't expect the result of COBOL → Java to be maintainable? Normally how I've seen that kind of move away from legacy done is use the legacy language (here, COBOL) as the source of truth, then gradually replace it one module at a time rather than trying to maintain the output of transpilation.
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Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️replied to Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ last edited by
@xris @aud I guess that gets back to @ireneista's point about COBOL being line-oriented, though... that would absolutely make it much harder to replace module-by-module.
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Asta [AMP]replied to Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected] Perhaps that's why they think this will "totally work": why, LLMs are so "natural" and human like! Unlike that awful machine transpilation (which, you know, is auditable and not stochastic and actually works). So they, perhaps foolishly, think of this output as being maintainable?*
* they probably don't think any of this, but I wonder if that's somewhere in their brains as re: how this all works. -
Asta [AMP]replied to Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️ last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] oh, well. There's that too. I dunno much about COBOL so I don't have that level of insight into the problem.
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@aud @xris @xgranade there's that for sure. the idea that functions and code blocks should always have well-defined boundaries, not porous edges, had to be invented. any attempt to translate to a modern language needs to grapple with that tension. in our other thread we wrote about our experience writing a mechanical translator for a language called DB/C...........
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@aud @xgranade it scans as a reasonable choice to me. It has a few desirable properties:
1) It's not COBOL (read as: you can find literally anybody to maintain it)
2) It has a *lot* of operational experience in "this absolutely must not fall over" contexts. See (1), not only can you find a lot of people to work on it, you can find a lot of people whose entire careers are organized around critical support for keeping applications in it afloat.
3) It's perfectly adequate. Not sexy, but fine.
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Xandra Granade 🏳️⚧️replied to SpookJ 👻 last edited by