Thursday 29 January 2009
What real life bad habits has programming given you? ☀
20+ years of professional programmer experience has totally warped me in various ways and means…
- Always seeking a shortcut in accomplishing a task, even if ends up taking longer than just doing it manually, just so I can automate the affair for next time (even if there won’t be a next time).
- Dreaming that I’m trapped in an executing program/script.
- Clinging to the use of monospaced fonts for way too long.
- Injecting regular expression syntax and shell script variables into my informal writing (i.e., working for $BigMultinationalCorporation where I used my talents in (Li|U)nix)
- The occasional use of ‘^H’.
- Using X?(HTML|ML) tags in my writing (i.e., now you know the <SqueakyVoice>rest</SqueakyVoice> of the story…).
- Burdened with the notion that all must be searchable ((Ctrl|Cmd)+F these days, F5 in my previous life as a IBM mainframe programmer).
- Looking at text characters (and control keys) and immediately picturing their hexadecimal (ASCII|EBCDIC) equivalent codes.
- Typing in ALL CAPS (old mainframe days) or all lowercase.
(via marco):
I temporize way too much in conversation. Things that anyone else would say as fact, I will still throw a “probably” or “perhaps” on, because I know there could always be that one edge case where a meteor strikes my neighborhood and I wouldn’t after all be able to make it out that day to Thanksgiving dinner.
Check out the later pages, too.
I throw my important documents into a shoebox instead of sorting them. I figure that I so rarely read from that cache compared to how often I write to it that it’s overall cheaper to have expensive reads and really fast writes.
My favorite Stack Overflow thread so far.
