this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
137 points (88.3% liked)

Programmer Humor

22245 readers
769 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] diemartin@sh.itjust.works 5 points 6 hours ago
fprintf(stdout, "%c", '\012');
[–] Archr@lemmy.world 5 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)
[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 3 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

I just learned that in Python, it's fucking terrible. Python is a fucking mess and my next script will be in a different language.

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago

Perhaps TS is not a terrible language for shell scripts after all

[–] andMoonsValue@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

As a python lover, I have to ask, what don't you like about it and what languages do you generally prefer?

[–] jdeath@lemm.ee 2 points 7 hours ago

python is a bad joke that never ends

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 10 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Fuck endl, all my homies hate endl

[–] jdeath@lemm.ee 1 points 7 hours ago

bloods 4 lyfe

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 1 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Cout << "\n"; is dumb and you should feel bad

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 0 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

You're right, that is incredibly dumb. Just not for the reasons you think it is. Imagine using iostream rather than stdio and unironically trying to clown on \n

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Is this not a debate for freshman students and other assorted opinionated know-nothings? Or just people shitposting.

My mistake. You think it's srs.

(And your opinion is still bad)

[–] Gustephan@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

Oh no! Did I hurt your feelings by clapping back when you insulted me on a shitpost comment chain? Your lack of self awareness is astounding

[–] Oinks@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I am very sorry to remind everyone about the existence of Visual Basic, but it has:

  • VbCrLf
  • VbNewLine
  • ControlChars.CrLf
  • ControlChars.NewLine
  • Environment.NewLine
  • Chr(13) & Chr(10)

And I know what you're asking: Yes, of course all of them have subtly different behavior, and some of them only work in VB.NET and not in classic VB or VBA.

The only thing you can rely on is that "\r\n" doesn't work.

[–] MTK@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Apology not accepted, fuck you for reminding me!

[–] jdeath@lemm.ee 2 points 7 hours ago

great reminder to avoid microsoft products as much as i can

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

Simple. \n when you just want a newline.
endl when you need to flush at the moment.

Useful in case you are printing a debug output right before some function that might do bed stuff to buffers.


Edit: I wrote println instead of endl somehow. Guess I need more downtime

[–] embed_me@programming.dev 5 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

I only program in C. I was under the assumption that \n also flushes

[–] pelya@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

It depends on whether you are printing to a terminal or to a file (and yes the terminal is also a file), and even then you can control the flushing behaviour using something like unbuffer

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 2 points 16 hours ago

I remember having to fflush a couple of times.

[–] heavydust@sh.itjust.works 46 points 1 day ago (3 children)

No debate, std::endl can be a disaster on some platforms due to flushing crap all the time.

[–] Rednax@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

Considering std::cout should only directly be used when you are too lazy to place breakpoints, I totally get the decision to auto-flush.

[–] mmddmm@lemm.ee 34 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's a very C++ thing that the language developers saw the clusterfuck that is stream flushing on the kernel and decided that the right course of action was to create another fucking layer of hidden inconsistent flushing.

[–] jdeath@lemm.ee 2 points 7 hours ago

programmers manage to do stupid shit in every language. i was wondering if there was a way to stop them, and golang comes close but maybe proves it can't be done. idk!

I hear C++ was greatly inspired by the fifth circle of hell.

[–] joyjoy@lemm.ee 20 points 1 day ago

Just because the box says something is flushable doesn't mean you should flush it.

[–] pelya@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

printf is superior and more concise, and snprintf is practically the only C string manipulation function that is not painful to use.

Try to print a 32-bit unsigned int as hexadecimal number of exactly 8 digits, using cout. You can do std::hex and std::setw(8) and std::setfill('0') and don't forget to use std::dec afterwards, or you can just, you know, printf("%08x") like a sane person.

Just don't forget to use -Werror=format but that is the default option on many compilers today.

C++23 now includes std::print which is exactly like printf but better, so the whole argument is over.

[–] SqueakyBeaver@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 15 hours ago

I went digging in cppref at the format library bc I thought c++20 or c++23 added something cool.

Found std::print and was about to reply to this comment to share it bc I thought it was interesting. Then I read the last sentence.

Darn you and your predicting my every move /j

std::cout << "\nwhy not both" << std::endl;
[–] LambdaRX@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I prefer \n for 0.001% better performance

[–] Lembot_0001@lemm.ee 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I prefer \n for less typing.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I prefer endl for more typing because it lets me pretend to work more than I am

[–] jdeath@lemm.ee 1 points 7 hours ago

^ least deranged coder

[–] rikudou 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

In PHP it exists as well. I try to use PHP_EOL but when I'm lazy I simply do "\n".

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

For me the answer is “Building backend applications with it instead of CLI applications, like Lerdorf intended.”

But also "\n" because it's easier and PHP_EOL is just an alias for "\n"; it's not even platform-dependent.

[–] rikudou 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

PHP_EOL depends on your host system, it's \r\n on Windows.

I don't really want to use what Lerdorf intended, PHP <= 4 was horrible, 5.x was mainly getting slowly rid of nonsense and with 7.x PHP started its slow path of redemption and entered its modern era.

While Lerdorf's vision was great at that time for its intended use case, I wouldn't want to build anything serious in it.

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 1 points 20 hours ago

It actually outputs "\n" on a Windows system, but modern Windows to recognise that as enough of a newline, nowadays.

I don't really want to use what Lerdorf intended, PHP <= 4 was horrible

Actually a great point!

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe c# has similar. There's \r\n or \n like c++ and Environment.NewLine.

Probably it's similar in that Environment.NewLine takes into account the operating system in use and I wonder if endl in c++ does the same thing?

[–] vithigar@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago

C# also has verbatim strings, in which you can just put a literal newline.

string foo = @"This string 
has a line break!";
[–] astrsk@fedia.io 3 points 1 day ago

Just puts(“I’m a teapot”); :)

C++ style text streams are bad and a dead-end design and '\n'.

[–] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

Wasn't this {fmt} library merged into STL now? Does this solve this issue?

Anyways, there was also a constant that is the OS line ending without a flush, right?

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If endl is a function call and/or macro that magically knows the right line ending for whatever ultimately stores or reads the output stream, then, ugly though it is, endl is the right thing to use.

If a language or compiler automatically "do(es) the right thing" with \n as well, then check your local style guide. Is this your code? Do what you will. Is this for your company? Better to check what's acceptable.

If you want to guarantee a Unix line ending use \012 instead. Or \cJ if your language is sufficiently warped.

[–] pelya@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago

Ah don't worry, if you do fopen(file, "w") on Windows and forget to use "wb" flag, it will automatically replace all your \n with \r\n when you do fwrite, then you will try to debug for half a day your corrupted jpeg file, which totally never happened to me because I'm an experienced C++ developer who can never make such a novice mistake.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 9 points 1 day ago

It's a "stream manipulator" function that not only generates a new line, it also flushes the stream.

load more comments
view more: next ›