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John R. Shaw wrote:
That reminds me of a Star trek game I found on the NC State U bulletin board in the late 80's. I liked that game.
Ah yes, I spent many a late night playing that game at the University of Texas, as I waited for my jobs to run on the mainframe in grAD SCHOOL.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr.PhD P. E.
Comport Computing
Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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I saw a copy of the source for the UT one…
Loading raw dilithium crystals started at a 5-10% chance of explosion and doubled each time you did it!
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You just reminded me. There was an old "adventure game" (text based), I Forget the name, had a Z in it.
But my absolute favorite to this day:
"You are in a room with blood stained walls, there is a grate on the floor"
Lick Walls
"You're Gross!"
-- LITERALLY ROTFLMAO. Realizing that the programmer had to program this "eventuality", and that I tripped it. It IGNITED my desire to program. We had a paper diagram of all the rooms.
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Cool. I worked at the computer center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the early 80's on a group of four Vaxen. There was a CDC-6600 next door to the Vax area.
Software Zen: delete this;
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In 77 and 78 I was working as a 2nd shift computer operator for a small company while taking programming classes during the day, and I spent many an hour converting the Star Trek game from David Ahl's 101 Basic Computer Games to RPG so I could play it in the unused partition on the IBM System/3 we had there.
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Last night herself was watching a show and I decided to start reading a book to learn React.  I know, but I wanted to see what it does.
The 2nd chapter of this book (Learning React: Modern Patterns for Developing React Apps 2, Banks, Alex, Porcello, Eve, eBook - Amazon.com[^]) melted my brain!!
I discovered JavaScript Destructuring!
Quote: Destructuring assignment allows you to locally scope fields within anobject and to declare which values will be used.
Code Sample
const sandwich = { bread: "dutch crunch",
meat: "tuna", cheese: "swiss",
toppings: ["lettuce", "tomato", "mustard"]
};
const { bread, meat } = sandwich;
console.log(bread, meat);
You see, the sandwich object can be all chopped up and turned into separate objects.
It's very cool AND very terrible!
Destructured Array
const [firstAnimal] = ["Horse", "Mouse", "Cat"];
console.log(firstAnimal);
See, now you have a variable that contains the first value.
Suppose you want a variable that contains the last value.
const [, , thirdAnimal] = ["Horse", "Mouse", "Cat"];
console.log(thirdAnimal);
Getting To A Point
I'm getting to the main point, here and I think it has a pay-off
Now we also know that JavaScript (and many modern languages) have the concept of a anonymous functions (C#) or arrow functions in JavaScript.
They are very convenient and helpful and can make code much more readable.
hello = val => console.log("Hello " + val);
hello("test this")
Think About the Young Impressionable Minds
Now, think about new devs who come along and learn this stuff first thing.
Suddenly this is the beautiful code. It is amazing.
You can do anything at anytime. It's ad hoc!!!
You don't have to worry about program structure or anything, cuz you can just get your values and re-organize them (destructure) and create an arrow function and you're on your way.
Think about how different that learning to program is now!?!
My mind exploded!! Now I understand why software is actually further from an engineering discipline now. Back in the day we focused on at least some beginning structure, some OOP and architecture.
It Was About Organization
It wasn't just about rigidity, it was about organization. It was hopefully better for maintenance.
Steaming Pile of Software
Now, just sit down and type and suddenly you have a steaming pile of software.
Yes, I understand how great these things can be for DTO (data transfer objects) etc. but learning this stuff first is probably very unhelpful.
Just thought it was interesting. And this is why I learn new code and read new books all the time. Programming is definitely changing.
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I concur.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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C# sort of has it too, with deconstructing:
Deconstructing tuples and other types | Microsoft Docs[^]
It's quick and easy to do with tuples, but you can add any number of Deconstruct methods to a class as well. I see destructuring (in any language) as another tool in your toolbox that can be helpful if used judiciously. Of course, that depends on people having good taste and knowing when to use something, and when not to. 
I also find it mildly amusing that every language seems to be slowly implementing features Common Lisp had decades ago - destructuring bind, in this case. I'm convinced that Lisp programmers are playing the long game and aiming to achieve ultimate victory by very gradually changing every programming language into Lisp. Maybe some variant of Greenspun's Tenth Rule in action here. 
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Ryan Peden wrote: Of course, that depends on people having good taste and knowing when to use something, and when not to
Agree 100% and that really is my point. These new features are really great when used at the appropriate time. I just see that now in many cases all programming is becoming these bits and pieces type of things and many newer devs think this is correct.
A Training / Teaching Problem, Really
It is most likely the fault of the training and not the language, of course.
It's just becoming quite pervasive and I believe is leading to a lot of crapware that does a few things right, looks shiny but then has bugs that no one can find because the maintenance is a nightmare.
Ryan Peden wrote: every language seems to be slowly implementing features Common Lisp had decades ago
That's fantastic you mentioned that, because I often mention this new functional-type aspects of new languages and people mention old languages had this already. I believe it. Again, I think these new things are great. It's just that they are so often meant to be used 20% of the time and instead they are implemented 98% of the time. 
Great discussion.
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Yeah, exactly. Every feature needs to be used responsibly.
It's like...when I was a child, I loved grape Kool-Aid. It was tasty and fun. I would have happily drank a gallon of it per day. But the adults in my life wouldn't let me.
Now that I'm an adult, I could drink a gallon of Kool-Aid every day, because nobody would stop me. But I don't, because I'm not crazy. Everything in moderation, right?
But with features like destructuring, some developers don't have that sense of moderation. They think that since you can destructure, you should destructure everything. Heck, now that I think about it, maybe they are sitting there guzzling grape Kool-Aid as they destructure every second line of their JS. If you're going to go overboard you may as well go all-in.
And you're right - it's funny how most new features are really that new at all. Maybe if we had all learned from Perl, developers would be cognizant of the horrors of destructuring run amok and be a little more hesitant to pull it out of their JS toolbox too often.
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I see your deconstructing and raise you var. I die a little inside every time I see C# code that looks like Javascript. var was meant for implicit typing of generated types without accessible symbols (e.g. anonymous types).
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I love var and auto
*hides*
*peeks out*
I hate duck typed languages though
Real programmers use butterflies
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We've all got a little inconsistency in us. I like Typescript but despise raw Javascript.
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I agree with you about typescript. I actually think it's kind of refreshing to have hard types over the top of JS.
It almost makes me want to use it. I may have to soon as I'm about to code a VS Code extension (bless VS Code)
Real programmers use butterflies
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Oh cool. I recently (last 6-ish months) started using VS Code. I really like it so far.
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It has finally replaced visual studio for me, but then i've been doing a lot of development for cross platform including unix, windows, apple, and even arduinos so I'm not coding on a windows OS primarily. I'm on linux right now.
But I really like VS Code. The cpp extension intellisense is still a bit rough around the edges compared to visual studio, but much better than other offerings even at that.
and the extensions.. i can view any kind of file i want. The 31 flavors of makefile, an html file, hell, even a graphviz dot file, complete with graphical preview.
It's fantastic. I don't need 20 editors in my kit anymore. And I think extensions can sync across machines so you might not have to set it up over and over again every time you change machines, although don't quote me on that. I'm still looking into it.
Real programmers use butterflies
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For writing code var is great, for reading code var is not always so great.
I reckon at least 90% of my time is spent reading code.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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I agree on the last two points, but I can't say I agree on the first.
var x = retrieveValue();
What type is x? You could use intellisense in most IDEs to see but that takes time. It also has another subtle but potentially nefarious problem: it shows the actual type but not the type you need. In situations where you require a super/base type but receive a sub/derived type, you may be fooled into thinking that the code expects the sub/derived type if you aren't familiar with the architecture (e.g. maintainers, new contributors). There are a slew of problems that could come from this.
Personally I feel like that last point is largely irrelevant despite being potentially serious since the greater issue is that you've willingly become less expressive purely to save a couple keystrokes. That's just my 2 cents though. I know some projects that liberally use var and have kept the issues under control even if I'd argue the time spent on control outweighs the keystrokes saved.
Also in all fairness my argument blurs the read/write line a bit, but maintenance inevitably requires modifying/writing code.
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But who the hell is naming their function retrieveValue?
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Someone who's typing up an example? 
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Ryan Peden wrote: you can add any number of Deconstruct methods to a class as well
You can also add deconstructors as extension methods:
static class DateExtensions
{
public static void Deconstruct(this DateTime value, out int year, out int month, out int day) => (year, month, day) = (value.Year, value.Month, value.Day);
}
var (year, month, _) = DateTime.Today;
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Don't worry, all this will go away as the business model moves to low code / no code solutions.
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Here young programmer: take this rope. Take as much as you need...
cheers
Chris Maunder
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