Why are programmers so snarky?
I don't usually ask programmers for help, because I'm pretty good with search engines and have enough experience that I'm pretty familiar with the kinds of problems that I work on solving. But once in a while, something new pops up that's so large and bizarre that I wonder if someone's written some pre-made code somewhere to take care of it, and the only way to find this stuff is usually to ask a programming community forum like perlmonks.org.
The problem I was working on was taking in a macro script and interpreting it into an internal structure for later processing. Text processing is always pretty complicated, so I wondered if someone had written a module for interpreting made-up computer languages, or failing that, some cute regular expressions* that could get me started.
Anyway, I'm grateful for the help I got. What wigs me out though is the number of high-post-count programmers who missed the point of the post entirely.
* Two programmers tried to convince me to switch the macro language format to something called YAML (Yet Another Markup Language), which is easy to process, but remarkably ugly, and thus would be pretty shitty to type questionnaires in.
* One programmer tried to convince me to switch the macro language format to XML, which is like HTML -- but even HARDER TO READ.
* One programmer telling me that calling it a "macro language" made me seem dumb as it had no functional or procedural elements in the simplified example I posted. And he advised that in the future I should call it a data description language if I want any help from them.
So here's the thing, all these guys (and by guys, I mean just males, mostly with monty python quotes in their signatures) are collected together, helping each other become better programmers. And out of a dozen responses, only one guy out of all of them bothered to describe in plain english what he felt that the best solution was. Everyone else missed the point entirely or tried to change the language to something easier for them to work with.
I consider myself to be fairly socially inept, but these guys -- man, I'm surprised they have jobs.
* Regular expressions are mathematical formulas for describing text patterns, for example "^\s*(\w)" means find the first word that begins at a line and computer, be advised that there may be some blank spaces or tabs before the word. Real-world regular expressions are way more complex. I should post the ridiculous regular expression for finding e-mail addresses in webpages some day. It would be boring though, so I won't.
I don't usually ask programmers for help, because I'm pretty good with search engines and have enough experience that I'm pretty familiar with the kinds of problems that I work on solving. But once in a while, something new pops up that's so large and bizarre that I wonder if someone's written some pre-made code somewhere to take care of it, and the only way to find this stuff is usually to ask a programming community forum like perlmonks.org.
The problem I was working on was taking in a macro script and interpreting it into an internal structure for later processing. Text processing is always pretty complicated, so I wondered if someone had written a module for interpreting made-up computer languages, or failing that, some cute regular expressions* that could get me started.
Anyway, I'm grateful for the help I got. What wigs me out though is the number of high-post-count programmers who missed the point of the post entirely.
* Two programmers tried to convince me to switch the macro language format to something called YAML (Yet Another Markup Language), which is easy to process, but remarkably ugly, and thus would be pretty shitty to type questionnaires in.
* One programmer tried to convince me to switch the macro language format to XML, which is like HTML -- but even HARDER TO READ.
* One programmer telling me that calling it a "macro language" made me seem dumb as it had no functional or procedural elements in the simplified example I posted. And he advised that in the future I should call it a data description language if I want any help from them.
So here's the thing, all these guys (and by guys, I mean just males, mostly with monty python quotes in their signatures) are collected together, helping each other become better programmers. And out of a dozen responses, only one guy out of all of them bothered to describe in plain english what he felt that the best solution was. Everyone else missed the point entirely or tried to change the language to something easier for them to work with.
I consider myself to be fairly socially inept, but these guys -- man, I'm surprised they have jobs.
* Regular expressions are mathematical formulas for describing text patterns, for example "^\s*(\w)" means find the first word that begins at a line and computer, be advised that there may be some blank spaces or tabs before the word. Real-world regular expressions are way more complex. I should post the ridiculous regular expression for finding e-mail addresses in webpages some day. It would be boring though, so I won't.