Love the shoutout to Margaret Hamilton
The majority of “programmers in the past” should be women actually, but our meme formats are still too patriarchal to express that in 2025.
No, I don’t think so. It’s true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.
In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today’s programming were from Grace Hopper’s era in the 1950s.
In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.
That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.
Depends how far you go back. The top half is pretty representative of the professional dev team I was in in 1992.
The moon landing by hand wouldn’t have been as funny without the over the top body builders first.
“too patriarchal” no one was thinking of “furthering the goals of the patriarchy” or whatever your delusions tell you.
It’s just people making memes, and most people who make memes who are guys will make memes with guys in them, because they identify with them the most.
Your brain dead take is pure cancer.
Dude. Chill. Ain’t nobody giving a shit about your take on someone else’s take.
I agree with you: I never intended to imply explicit anti-diversity intentions or even awareness of the biases embedded in our culture.
Implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. Implicit biases are activated involuntarily, unconsciously, and without one’s awareness or intentional control (see, e.g., Greenwald & Krieger, 2006; Kang, et al., 2012; Nier, 2005; Rudman, 2004a)
The large initial percentage of female coders was due to computer having been a female job, because secretary was. Their role within companies didn’t change, what changed is that they were using machines to do the computing instead of doing it by hand.
We’re kinda lucky to have the woke trifecta (Ada, Grace, Alan) (first programmer (woman), inventor of compilers (woman), absolute unit (gay)) to keep the chuds at bay. Even if we weren’t all socially inept nerds (or pretending to be so to bosses) there’s only so much you can do, culturally, if the population is growing exponentially. Uncle Bob (yes I know he’s a chud) did the maths at some point IIRC it was something like the number of programmers doubling every two years. Which also means that at any one point in time roughly 2/3rds of programmers have no idea what they’re doing, which explains the javascript ecosystem.
You can throw Margaret Hamilton in there, who was in charge of the software team that landed people on the moon. The picture of her standing next to a printout of the Apollo guidance software is iconic.
At first I thought this was the Wicked Witch of the West’s actress and thought she must have been multitalented. Then I looked it up to verify. Nope, same name, different women.
If you want famous actresses who contributed to technology, you want Hedy Lamarr:
At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers.
Obligatory Grace Hopper
“Creates a whole game in assembly” is probably referring to roller coaster tycoon, which was written by a man. (lots of other games were written in asm, like many NES games, but I’d wager RCT was what they were alluding to)
That was my immediate thought. There were many that came before RCT, but it has the distinction of being (possibly) one of the last in an industry that had already moved on to higher-level languages to do merely half as much.
We need to bring back 2010-2012 rage comic memes. All we needed was a badly cut-out blonde wig to trans Derp’s gender.
The glory days of Derp and Derpina
It’s 2025 and I have no idea what the current way to center something is. Then again, my job is that of a backend engineer so it’s rare I’m outputting anything that isn’t a log statement. They can pry tables and center tags from my cold, aging hands.
IMO tables should be more used for… tabular data. Shocking, I know, but the amount of websites that try to emulate a table with
divs anduls out there is crazy.
I once had a junior calling me in a panic because he didn’t know how to quit nano. NANO!
That deserves a “do you know how to read?”, because the exit command is on the lower part of the screen for nano
To be fair, they show up as “^X” or whatever, and typing [Shift]+[6] followed by the [X]-key doesn’t do the trick.
Nano… Like… The one that has all the keybinds permanently shown at the bottom of the screen?
Onscreen instructions unclear, pressed Shift+6+X. Still stuck in Nano.
Yeah, that one…
Burnt into the old LCD screen.
And your retinas.
Nano nano!
drinks water with finger
Ork humor. Love it.
I had an intermediate not understand how to read a pipe-delimited text file.
Read as in, with their eyes? Or how to ingest it into some other app/script? Cos I’m vaguely aware that awk can be used in some way for this, but wouldn’t have a clue how.
The former.
awk is practically made for record processing, within the shell you can set
$IFS. The reason so many ancient UNIX file formats use:as separator is because that’s the default setting of$IFS.It’s all a huge PITA, though. I mean there’s a reason why people started using perl instead. Nushell is great for that kind of stuff, even more so if you have random json or such lying around it loads just as easily. “Everything is a string” was a mistake.
Huh? Isn’t it like right there at the bottom of the screen?
I guess not knowing that ^X means Control+X could be the issue, but still…
TIL!
Can exit nano on my own, have the common sense to not call in a panic about it before at least looking it up. (Which is how I learned how to exit it: looking it up.) But was never taught about ^ meaning “Control+” until your comment, especially since nowadays people write it out as “Control+” or “CTRL+”.
I might have put two and two together when dealing with everything else in nano after I learned to exit, but never really internalized the rule “^ means Control+”. So thank you for your comment!
Disclaimer: I feel like I am too stupid for most of programming.dev but participate here anyways because I learn stuff from the comments.
Don’t feel stupid. It’s bad enough that all of IT is one giant impostor-syndrome support group. There’s literally too much for any one person to know, and it’s been that way for a very long time. Just give it your all, and memorize how to reliably search and look things up; take notes for the really important stuff. The rest will filter into your memory with practice.
Also: anyone that holds this kind of thing over your head is attempting to distract from how much they don’t know. Most people in this industry understand and don’t judge.
As for the
^thing, I recall seeing that as far back as the 1990’s. I want to say Microsoft actually popularized it, but it could easily be OS2 (IBM) or Apple. In hindsight, it’s kind of wild to have a TUI (terminal user interface) hold your hand like this. Nano (and Pico) are kind of in a special category like that.
Do you remember the “press any key to exit”? Someone asked where is the “any” key.
I still want to get into coding the OG manual way (because I enjoy pain and disappointment apparently) but now it seems like a waste of time since vibe coders and 13 year olds already are lightyears ahead of me. Also I have no reason to learn it, all apps are already built xD
all apps are already built
Couldn’t be further from the truth. You also have to consider competition.
Can’t think of anything that could serve a major need right now, but I absolutely identified things in my life where I could use a preexisting tool to accomplish my goal, but it’s much less hassle for me to use the one I made for myself. You don’t have to transform the world, sometimes you can help yourself with a minor inconvenience and then put it out there for anyone who might find themselves with the same inconvenience.
I’m in the same boat. I used to be an amateur front and back end web developer. Almost made a text based RPG in middle school. I had to stop when shit got crazy in high school and college, but I don’t feel like any programming is worth my time right now. I’m focusing on gardening and maybe some cooking. You know, human activities that we can still enjoy.
Yeahh exactly. AI has pretty much ruined computer based fun now. Which in some ways is good, we should all learn physical hobbies again and not be reliant on tech. I still enjoy my hobby desktop computers though, I just enjoy learning how it really works under the surface.
I feel very confident in my understanding of random 8 bit CPUs and their support chips, but asking me to center a div is like this xkcd.
I’ve never understood why people are so intimidated by tar
The
I almost never create a tarball, so I have to look up the syntax for that. Which is as simple as
man tar. But as far as extracting it almost couldn’t be easier,tar xf <tarball>and call it a day. Or if you want to list the contents without extracting,tar tf <tarball>. Unless you’re using an ancient version of tar, it will detect and handle whatever compression format you’re using without you having to remember if you needzorJor whatever.
It is sticky and pretty much ruins clothes.
tar -eXtract Ze Vucking File
Thanks! This will definitely help me to remember it from now on.
Me 6 months from now:
tar -EZVF
Me in 6 months "
how to install winzip using terminal"
Nobody wants to deliberately use the wrong compression type when extracting, so modern tar will figure out the compression itself if you just point it at a file. So
tar -xf filenameworks on almost anything. You don’t need to remember which flag to use on a.tar.bz2file and which one for a.tar.xzfile.That doesn’t give me a memorable mnemonic though.
tar -eXtract File
yeah, but then how am I supposed to remember “tar” ? :P
Tape ARchive -eXtract File
One reason is that tar supports both traditional style args “tar tf <filename.tar>” and unix-style args “tar -tf <filename.tar>” but there are subtle differences in how they work.
Literally the only time I’ve ever run into that is when I was trying to manipulate the path it extracted to. In 99% of cases I’m doing tf, xf, or cf plus flags for the compression type, etc, and those differences are irrelevant.
I used something recently where it wasn’t possible to use the traditional-style args. I think it was a “diff”, which meant I needed a “-f”. It wasn’t a big deal, but, occasionally it does happen.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. This thread started because I said I’ve never understood why people talk like tar is some indecipherable black magic. Common tasks are easy and there’s a man page for everything else.
I got tired of looking up the options for each possible combination of archiving + compression, so today I have a “magic” bash function that can extract almost any format.
Then for compressing, I only use
zip, which doesn’t need any args other than the archive name and the thing you’re compressing. It needs-rwhen recursing on dirs, but unlike “eXtract” and “Ze”, that’s a good mnemonic.
tar --help
(joke)
YOU FOOL! THE ACTUAL COMMAND WAStar -?That dash looks an awful lot like an em-dash
Normal:
-Em:
–
Honestly, CSS is a fucking joke and its solely to blame for why centering something isn’t always straightforward.
By the way, this picture is a crock of shit for people who aren’t programmers. Anyone who is a programmer will not take it seriously because programming is so much more about helping others instead of shaming them.
CSS is amazing, if you know how to use it 😉
Everybody complaining about css like “but it doesn’t do what I want if to do without me investing a minute into why”.
Ironically, it’s oh so often the RTFM crowd.
Stackoverflow: exists solely from the urge of developers to help developers, and since ExpertsExchange was paid dogshit.
This meme: pisses on its whole purpose.
Nah, it’s not that bad.
In 10 years with continued AI use? Yep.I’m thankful for AI. It guarantees my job as developer will continue to exist to repair all future AI-damage.
I once had an intern attempt to install sudo using NPM and when that didn’t work he asked ChatGPT “Why can’t I install sudo from NPM?” while I’m trying to explain it to him.
He was smart, but somehow knew very little about commercial computers despite being on the verge of getting his master’s in computer science.
“Wait why can’t I install windows iso from vscode extension store?”
QA: “Yeah, Hi. Can you look at this defect ticket?”
Reading ticket details…
Me: “Let me guess. Is [whatshisname] responsible for this?”
QA: “Yeah.”
Me: “Get him to fix it.”
QA: “I tried. Like four times.”
Me: Sigh “I’ll take care of it.”
QA: “Thank you!”
Oh no, I was never a programmer in the past.
Wth is “Fixing memory leaks using pointers”?
Similar energy:
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I know someone that still uses ed for all their code editing.
Hey buddy, if I fix one bug and cause three more, it’s called job security. Where’s my medal?
Getting to keep your job is your medal then.
I have to say, I’m pretty sure those guys were in the past too.
People have been hm unable to quit vim since before I was born.
I swore up & down that I’d learn at least two ways of exiting VIM. I even went through basic training to learn all the shortcuts, but it interfered with my regular workflow, so I dropped it “for a bit”. It’s been a year and I can’t remember a damn thing.
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May the :helpgrep be ever on their side
