Post by John McCueThis 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.)