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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++
Subject: [OT] Re: Music while in a coding session...
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2024 09:45:41 +0200
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On 17/07/2024 02:07, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> On 7/15/2024 7:53 PM, John McCue wrote:

>>
>> This is OT, usually I would ignore, but :)
>>
>> I have never done that over the many decades I have
>> been a programmer.  I would suggest you do no more then
>> say 12 hours straight.  Mistakes will happen plus, this
>> will affect your health.
>>
>> Just a friendly warning.
> 
> Not OT, most programmers love music.  The arithmetic of music draws our 
> attention to it.
> 

It is /completely/ OT for these groups.  Most programmers are humans, 
and most humans are fond of music.  This is not exactly a revelation.

IMHO, an occasional totally off-topic thread in technical groups is no 
bad thing.  But don't pretend it is relevant to anything.

A discussion of programming environments might be considered somewhat 
technical.  Is it better to have a some background music, or silence 
when programming?  Is it better to have many shorter sessions or a few 
long ones?  Is an all-nighter a good idea or not?  Is this dependent on 
the programmer in question, the way they work (individuals or teams), 
the type of project, the development stage (design, coding, debugging, 
testing, documentation) ?

And a discussion about people's programming history and background can 
be interesting and somewhat topical.  Does it make a difference if you 
learned C or C++ at university or are self-taught in the language?  Does 
a background with BASIC on home computers help, compared to, say, 
FORTRAN or BCPL on big machines?  Do people who learned C++98 carry over 
old habits to modern C++ programming?  Should C++ programmers first 
learn assembly to understand the underlying machine, should they first 
learn Haskell to learn to think of their code mathematically?

And we all like to talk about the good old days of ZX Spectrums with 
chewing gum keyboards and wobbly ram packs.  That would be totally off 
topic, however.  Some regulars, including me, think that's okay on 
occasion - others think it is never a good thing in these Usenet groups, 
and such threads will annoy them.  You can't please everyone all the 
time, of course, and no one should be expected to try.

But a thread apparently dedicated to "I like this music" is as inane and 
pointless as the Chris/Bonita pissing matches we see regularly in 
c.l.c++.  And random youtube links just make it even worse.  No one is 
at all interested in what music other people like - even those that have 
posted about what /they/ like.


Now, if Chris can get in the habit of putting his mindless "for some 
reason this made me think of ... youtube ... " posts in this thread 
alone, and not interspersed in real threads, then this OT thread would 
be a great thing.  (Chris also makes topical and sensible posts - it's 
only his addiction to posting youtube links that is annoying.)