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A comment on "Normal" engineers are the key to great teams. Parent comment

Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams by tdeck on Thursday March 13, 2025 @10:10PM (#43358972)
It was somewhat common in the 1970s and before for programming languages to support abbreviating variable names when you referenced them. So for example, you could say

    patients = 400
    x = pat / 2
And x would be 200. This seems like an obvious footgun today and I don't think any language designer would even consider it, but it seemed to make sense for a while.
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Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams by TylerE on Thursday March 13, 2025 @11:17PM (#43359286)
Were they actually supporting abbreviating or just doing something like only storing the first 3 characters of the name? That feels more like something a compiler trying to fit in 8k of RAM or whatever would do.
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Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams by lovich on Friday March 14, 2025 @12:51AM (#43359680)
Is there a difference between doing something and supporting something?

This joke is like a decade old at this point https://xkcd.com/1172/

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Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams by TylerE on Friday March 14, 2025 @01:11AM (#43359767)
Well, yes.

Namely, what does the following code do?

    patients = 400
    patents = 20
    x = patients / 10
If the compiler truncates, x will be 2 (assuming it allows variable reassignment), and you've probably introduced at least two bugs. It's doing some sort of lookup against the source, well, all bets are really off.
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Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams by lovich on Friday March 14, 2025 @01:33AM (#43359872)
You have ignored my question

“Doing something” is the beginning of how to describe the actual truth of what some actions causes in relation to its affect on reality.

“Supporting something” has literally nothing to do with reality beyond what’s necessary to support a brain that can _intend_ a result or action regardless of what actually happens.

I linked the xkcd comic because the behavior described by the developer in the comic met the criteria for “doing something” but it didn’t meet the criteria for “supporting something” because the behavior of the software was not what the developer intended.

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