I was nodding along with you (though I'm not into trains anymore) until this:
> Also I am a self taught DBA and never ever use keys. I’ll take in any incoming fire as probably deserved :).
... that's like saying "I'm a self-taught programmer, but I never use functions."
I mean, yeah, you can still get some things done that way, but if you spent a little time learning what's possible, you might be a lot happier with the end product.
Here come the traumatic memories of doing If/Then/Goto on TI-Basic, not understanding the Else or End tokens at all. Turns out each If/Then opens a new stack frame, and because I was never closing them with the corresponding tokens, memory slowly filled while the program ran. You could therefore get a high score of exactly 203 on my PONG clone before it crashed.
Good times! But seriously, take a few minutes to learn your tools properly if you use them more than once, it'll make things so much easier. :)
Will always crash after a couple seconds. Used to show it to my friends sometimes as a gag but it sucked to have to work around it.
(TI-BASIC uses = for equality comparison (iirc this includes comparing strings(?)) and -> as a single arrow symbol (STO on the keypad) for variable assignment (5->A for example is the same as A = 5 in Python).)
It would still be an improvement over the older BASIC dialects, because with those it was common to have a limit to the number of variables due to names being one or two letters.
Yep. ZX81 BASIC had 26 string variables (A$ through Z$) and 26 floating point variables (A through Z). No integer variables per se, but you could POKE and PEEK to get at 8-bit values anywhere in memory - which typically maxed out at 16K.
This used to be very common with VBA, I would expect these days it's more of a Python thing.
Someone wants to do something, they find out that the thing they want to do is "programming", and they start writing a script that can do that thing. They add to it, it gets longer, it works.
They probably know functions exist but don't really get why they would use one. There's a decent chance they'll never get it, and that's fine.
I have roughly ten python scripts I use for this and that, and three of them don't have any functions. I wrote a similar no-function python script for a work thing a couple jobs back, and my CTO was kind of ticked off, said I should know better, and don't submit it for code review again without a main() function and some "proper separation of concerns".
Which, fine; it's his company, the rewrite is trivial, I probably cleaned some things up a bit. But the script was fine the way it was.
> Also I am a self taught DBA and never ever use keys. I’ll take in any incoming fire as probably deserved :).
... that's like saying "I'm a self-taught programmer, but I never use functions."
I mean, yeah, you can still get some things done that way, but if you spent a little time learning what's possible, you might be a lot happier with the end product.