Once upon a time when backend developer had to wait for their code to compile and frontend developers only had to reload the page to see their latest changes, the frontend developers got jealous. And so they created frontend frameworks with webpack compilation. And that's how frontend frameworks were born. And now, both sides have to wait for their code to compile.

[–] misterhuh@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Old Fortran/Cobal programmer and those words were like magical words to thwart off any management questions. “Running out to get a coffee” “What now?” “Compiling” “Grab me one also would ya” Magic, just magic.

[–] jadero@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

I once came across this massive Excel program. Calling it a macro or even a script simply didn't do it justice. Anyway, I turned it into a script (calling Excel functions and actions instead of doing everything "by hand"). It went from taking a couple of hours to run to taking a couple of minutes. Pissed off a few people, but I got a nice contract out of it :)

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

More recent than this, but around 2010 I got roped into writing an app for Blackberry. Blackberry apps were written in Java which shouldn't have taken any time at all to compile, but to run code on a BB every module used had to be signed by the Blackberry servers, which were usually completely down or running so slowly that the tiniest changes to the code took upwards of an hour to be testable on the device. It was wonderful to have a built-in excuse for sitting around doing fucking nothing, with extra irony from the fact that Blackberry crashed and burned before the app was released so none of it made the slightest difference anyway.

[–] surrealpartisan@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

Source: https://xkcd.com/303/

[–] Neb@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Im a CG artist and for us its „it‘s rendering“

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

At my first pro job in 1995 I had a coworker who was a consultant for the company's Cyborg system. Cyborg was an obscure database/programming environment (so obscure that I've never been able to find any online reference to it) that dated from the 1970s and only a few companies by that time still used it, and my coworker was possibly the last person in the world who could still work with it. Everything that he did took just a few minutes to code but then hours (and sometimes days) to compile, so he mostly just sat around doing nothing, for $300 an hour (in 1995 dollars, no less). Eventually he convinced the company to let him work from home (with dialup Internet!), and he ended up getting two more remote gigs like this with other companies simultaneously. So he was making $900 an hour for easily less than an hour of real work each day.

Meanwhile I was coding in Visual Basic 3 and imagining a day far in the future when I would be the last VB programmer on Earth, raking in thousands of dollars a day doing nothing. It of course has not turned out that way ...

[–] abcd@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Doesn’t work if they program in Go 😉

[–] Elw@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It does if you write a sufficiently large program and you don’t split it in to multiple packages… ask me how I know 🫠

[–] mspencer712@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Or C# :-(

Though constantly updating nuget packages are helping bring break time back.

[–] KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have used compiling gentoo as an excuse to keep computer on all night

[–] Gentoo1337@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

On the other hand, I've had to keep my computer on all night because gentoo was updating

[–] CodingAndCoffee@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

At my job we describe this as "centering divs"

[–] overengineer@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

The web development equivalent is “Installing npm dependencies”

[–] aidan@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

MY EXPRESSION IS BEING EVALUATED

[–] hactar42@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

At my first job I had to kick off these SQL stored procs to process all the orders that came in overnight. It would take a good hour to hour and half to run. So I browsed the web, drank a bunch of caffeine, and generally slacked off the first hour of my day. Then we upgraded off of our 1990s server to SQL 2005 on brand new hardware and it took less than 5 minutes to run.

[–] someone_secret@burggit.moe 2 points 1 year ago

Meanwhile the python devs are crying in the corner