@kreyren @LordMordred @bwk I am not disagreeing with your OSS argument; my introduction to programming was through OSS and the only reason I am employed today.

This is about the OP saying "I tried programming but I gave up" post that is clearly not asking for help, but some along the lines of "i didn't like movie X" , you make them like the movie.

Also not everyone can make a living writing FOSS projects. Especially if you are not in the first world.

@FrailLeaf @LordMordred @bwk

> This is about the OP saying "I tried programming but I gave up" post that is clearly not asking for help, but some along the lines of "i didn't like movie X" , you make them like the movie.

People usually abandon learning programming as the learning curve to some programming languages is too steep for them to climb.. Usually if they get help from a developer who knows the language then they can learn within hours more than they ever did alone.
So such encouragements are viewed as ethical in computer science if you are willing to invest the time to teach them.

> Also not everyone can make a living writing FOSS projects. Especially if you are not in the first world.

Lol who told you that? People living in a 3rd world country getting hired to work on a FLOSS projects is very common from my experience.. Mostly because they are qualified to do the job and are more economical to hire.

@kreyren @LordMordred @bwk
Emphasis on "Not Everyone".

@FrailLeaf @LordMordred @bwk literally everyone.. There are not hard restrictions on who can be hired to work on an open-source projects.

@kreyren @LordMordred @bwk I do not understand why you keep ignoring my point, Not everyone working in software development/engineering are there because they enjoy it, you cannot help them love the job, they do it for the sake of it.

@FrailLeaf @LordMordred @bwk like they can always change an industry.. So what's your point?

@kreyren @LordMordred @bwk What? How does a person working a job, writing absolutely horrible code change the industry?......

@FrailLeaf @LordMordred @bwk

> How does a person working a job, writing absolutely horrible code change the industry?

The gross majority of people working on open-source projects write a horrible code it's by design done this way.

So again the important thing is abstracting and documenting the code preferably writing down what you are doing, how and why

@FrailLeaf @LordMordred @bwk e.g. what @lupyuen is doing with https://qoto.org/web/statuses/107793119639236951

@kreyren @LordMordred @bwk @lupyuen Its great that your experience in life with people learning to code have done well. I'm speaking from experience where the senior-most developers are doing a bad job at it, making no effort to maintain source-level docs, making it a nightmare for me to debug through the large codebase so I can maintain it.

@FrailLeaf @LordMordred @bwk Like footprinting is generally time efficient so what's the issue?

@kreyren @LordMordred @bwk what is footprinting?

@FrailLeaf @LordMordred @bwk

The practice of figuring out how the software works and why.

My way of doing it is by adding "WTF" comment tags all over the code as comments to things that i do not understand and then commenting out random codeblocks and changing them to see how it affects the outcome to write docs.

e.g.

fn main() {
println!("Hello, world!");
}

fn main() {
// WTF(Krey): what is this supposed to do?
println!("Hello, world!");
}

fn main() {
// WTF(Krey): what is this supposed to do?
println!("Hello, worldSSSSssss!");
}

Oh this block is the one that prints in the console!

fn main() {
// Outputs 'Hello, world!' in the console
println!("Hello, world!");
}

@kreyren @FrailLeaf @LordMordred @bwk The best way to analyze a large unknown codebase is to add logging statements. If you start removing random parts of code, you create so many unpredictable random chaos and failures that any behaviors you see as a result of that are more likely *misleading* rather than actually helpful.

"Experimental Development" is what I call that. Also if you determine your code is correct, because it behaves correctly, that's precisely the same mistake. You can only understand code from the inside, not from the outside, and the best way to analyze the inside is logging. Period. Full stop. There are essentially zero exceptions to that rule.

@clay @LordMordred @bwk @kreyren There's more efficient solution to just leaving logging statements; debugger. It is far more efficient and you can analyze scope at runtime.