Programmers then and now

I have never Googled "how to center div 2025" because the last time I had to center a div was in 2024. I've never asked ChatGPT to fix a syntax error because I use Copilot. Exiting Vim is basically the only thing I know how to do in Vim, but I can do it. And my bug fixin' is generally one-for-one.
On the flip side, I can write some code without StackOverflow and AI. Writing a game in Assembly, these days, is for a specific kind of hobbyist or absolute fools. Languages using pointers are mostly for specific types of application and completely irrelevant for most programmers these days -- and the overwhelming bulk of us are better for it. And writing code by hand is an incredible talent and skill, but again, essentially useless these days.

Similar energy:
- War horses and elephants entered the chat

I know someone that still uses ed for all their code editing.

Honestly, CSS is a fucking joke and it's solely to blame for why centering something isn't always straightforward.
By the way, this picture is a crock of shit for people who aren't programmers. Anyone who is a programmer will not take it seriously because programming is so much more about helping others instead of shaming them.

Nah, it's not that bad.
In 10 years with continued AI use? Yep.

I started with C++ and went to Java to .NET to Javascript and now to Terraform.
I know this is all a joke but there's something definitely different with the ones above and the ones below. There's a bit of satisfaction you can get sometimes when you're working with memory directly and getting faster feedback (yes, there's more math back then and it wasn't easy to look stuff up, for sure). However, there's new challenges nowadays ... there's so many layers on top of layers. I feel as though Stack Overflow and ChatGPT are so needed because the error messages and things we give are obfuscated or unclear (not always any library author's fault as there's compatibility issues, etc)
We're doing serverless stuff at my current company and none of our devs run code locally. They have to upload it using CDK or Serverless Framework to run on the cloud. We don't use SST so we can't set breakpoints but like that's a lot of crap inbetween just running your code already. Not even getting into the libraries and transpilers and stuff we use. I spent like a few weeks over Christmas to get our devs to run the code locally. Guess what? None of them use it because they're so use to uploading it. I was like, "you can put breakpoints in it! you can have nodemon and it instant reloads! nope, none of them care ... "
- First learning is last learning.
  Same reason we still do console.log("FUCK").
  
  First learning is last learning.
  I'll be the dumb one to ask: what do you mean? Is this that making a mistake that costs a lot is the best teacher, because you only have to mess it up once to learn it forever?

Oh no, I was never a programmer in the past.

I still want to get into coding the OG manual way (because I enjoy pain and disappointment apparently) but now it seems like a waste of time since vibe coders and 13 year olds already are lightyears ahead of me. Also I have no reason to learn it, all apps are already built xD
- all apps are already built
  Couldn't be further from the truth. You also have to consider competition.
  
  Can't think of anything that could serve a major need right now, but I absolutely identified things in my life where I could use a preexisting tool to accomplish my goal, but it's much less hassle for me to use the one I made for myself. You don't have to transform the world, sometimes you can help yourself with a minor inconvenience and then put it out there for anyone who might find themselves with the same inconvenience.
- I'm in the same boat. I used to be an amateur front and back end web developer. Almost made a text based RPG in middle school. I had to stop when shit got crazy in high school and college, but I don't feel like any programming is worth my time right now. I'm focusing on gardening and maybe some cooking. You know, human activities that we can still enjoy.
  
  Yeahh exactly. AI has pretty much ruined computer based fun now. Which in some ways is good, we should all learn physical hobbies again and not be reliant on tech. I still enjoy my hobby desktop computers though, I just enjoy learning how it really works under the surface.

I can't remember some syntax unless I do it at least 100 times. I often look up stuff that I have already done before and know because of my goldfish memory.

Okay but how do u center a div in 2025
- It's not about the center, it's about the friends we made along the way.
- maybe the div is already where it's meant to be
- 2050: people still wondering how to center a div because html and CSS is a nightmare.
- Make your web page in GIMP, export to PNG, <img>.
- Same way you did it in 2024 but it's easier because the springgirdles have been replaced with rotated manglebrackets.
- Depends if you're centering the div or the things in the div. Which has probably been the main issue since CSS was invented.
- If using plain CSS, usually it's enough to set width appropriately, and margin-left and margin-right to auto.
  If using a Modern Frontend/CSS Framework, then may God have mercy on your poor soul.
  (Seriously I just started a new project with TailwindCSS and I'm so confused. But not entirely desperate yet.)
  
  w-... mx-auto, replace the 3 dots with your desired width value, and that's it with tailwind
  
  So what is the point of these frameworks if they make it harder?
  
  I'm doing a small hobby project (a ladder/ranking system for playing beer sports with my community), and I tried out Tailwind.
  I gave up and loaded Bootstrap instead, but I will probably end up just writing all the CSS myself.
  Seems so silly to have 15 CSS classes on a single DOM element..
- Ask the browser nicely while using please and thanks.
- What threw me was having to set a width.
- If you define what you mean by centering I'll give you a straight answer.
  Vertically? Horizontally? Center the text or the entire box? Compared to the viewport, the parent container or the entire page?
  "Centering" isn't as straight forward as you'd think, and what you actually want usually depends on the situation.
  
  Fuck it, align='center'. That'll center it horizontally relative to some context and if that's not good enough then you should have been more precise in your request.
  
  Nah, just flex them boxes
- While centering div, you add one to 2023.
- You count half the pixels and put them in a margin-left

My experience is that the programmers from the first row very much still exist. My theory is that the number of programmers from the first row stayed the about same or even increased slightly. There are so many more so called "programmers" overall now, however, that in relation the first row programmers are much rarer now. And to be fair, you don't need a programmer capable of programming entire games in assembly to center a div.
- And vice versa, you don’t need to know how to centre a div to create a game in assembler. I’m comfortable using pointers and managing memory, but don’t ask me to do anything with web UI.
  
  This can be generalized to say that programming has become such a diverse profession that you will find experts in one area that know very little about others. There's simply too many things that are programmed in too many ways for anyone to know it all anymore. Hell, that was the case in the 70's and 80's too.
  
  I'm guessing that someone who figured out how to keep a high score box centered on screen using assembly will figure it out to do it with CSS.
  The reverse, not so much...

Can't exit Vim
Ah yes, the legendary filter
- the only reason people use vim is because they are stuck in there
- I first tried vi in the early 90s, before I had easy access to online resources. I had to open a new shell and kill the vi process to exit it. Next time I dialed into my usual BBS I asked how to exit that thing. But since then I've liked it, because vi has been on every system I ever ssh'ed into.
  
  You quit it just like you quit ed or ex, just that you have to enter the prompt (:) yourself as vi is not by default in prompt mode. And you should know ed, ed is the standard editor.
  I use Helix btw.
- I can exit Vim, it just feels like trying to rip out the dashboard and the interiors from a family car because race cars also lack them. Kate is a good speedy alternative to VSCode, not to mention it also does not have Microsoft's greedy hands on it.
  
  I don't get your analogy, but (neo)vim is a full featured IDE if you configure it to be one
- :x
  
  it says I don't have permission

QA: "Yeah, Hi. Can you look at this defect ticket?"
Reading ticket details...
Me: "Let me guess. Is [whatshisname] responsible for this?"
QA: "Yeah."
Me: "Get him to fix it."
QA: "I tried. Like four times."
Me: Sigh "I'll take care of it."
QA: "Thank you!"

I once had a junior calling me in a panic because he didn't know how to quit nano. NANO!
- Huh? Isn't it like right there at the bottom of the screen?
  I guess not knowing that ^X means Control+X could be the issue, but still...
  
  TIL!
  Can exit nano on my own, have the common sense to not call in a panic about it before at least looking it up. (Which is how I learned how to exit it: looking it up.) But was never taught about ^ meaning "Control+" until your comment, especially since nowadays people write it out as "Control+" or "CTRL+".
  I might have put two and two together when dealing with everything else in nano after I learned to exit, but never really internalized the rule "^ means Control+". So thank you for your comment!
  Disclaimer: I feel like I am too stupid for most of programming.dev but participate here anyways because I learn stuff from the comments.
- I mean, maybe it was just me but I had to search what the hell ^ meant in nano, but after that it was alright.
- Nano... Like... The one that has all the keybinds permanently shown at the bottom of the screen?
  
  Burnt into the old LCD screen.
  
  Onscreen instructions unclear, pressed Shift+6+X. Still stuck in Nano.
  
  Yeah, that one...
- Do you remember the "press any key to exit"? Someone asked where is the "any" key.
- Nano nano!
  drinks water with finger
  
  Ork humor. Love it.
- That deserves a "do you know how to read?", because the exit command is on the lower part of the screen for nano
- I had an intermediate not understand how to read a pipe-delimited text file.
  
  Read as in, with their eyes? Or how to ingest it into some other app/script? Cos I'm vaguely aware that awk can be used in some way for this, but wouldn't have a clue how.

Love the shoutout to Margaret Hamilton
- The majority of "programmers in the past" should be women actually, but our meme formats are still too patriarchal to express that in 2025.
  
  Depends how far you go back. The top half is pretty representative of the professional dev team I was in in 1992.
  
  No, I don't think so. It's true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.
  In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today's programming were from Grace Hopper's era in the 1950s.
  In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.
  That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.
  
  "Creates a whole game in assembly" is probably referring to roller coaster tycoon, which was written by a man. (lots of other games were written in asm, like many NES games, but I'd wager RCT was what they were alluding to)
  
  We need to bring back 2010-2012 rage comic memes. All we needed was a badly cut-out blonde wig to trans Derp's gender.
  
  So were "computers". It used to be a job, delegated mostly to women. The JD is doing calculations day in and day out.
  
  Obligatory Grace Hopper
  
  The moon landing by hand wouldn't have been as funny without the over the top body builders first.
  
  "too patriarchal" no one was thinking of "furthering the goals of the patriarchy" or whatever your delusions tell you.
  It's just people making memes, and most people who make memes who are guys will make memes with guys in them, because they identify with them the most.
  Your brain dead take is pure cancer.

I feel very confident in my understanding of random 8 bit CPUs and their support chips, but asking me to center a div is like this xkcd.
- tar --help
  
  (joke)
  YOU FOOL! THE ACTUAL COMMAND WAS tar -?
- I’ve never understood why people are so intimidated by tar
  
  One reason is that tar supports both traditional style args "tar tf <filename.tar>" and unix-style args "tar -tf <filename.tar>" but there are subtle differences in how they work.
  
  tar -eXtract Ze Vucking File
  
  It is sticky and pretty much ruins clothes.
  
  It is "backwards" from some other commands --- usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).
  That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.
  And the icing on the cake is that I don't use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least...).
  
  I got tired of looking up the options for each possible combination of archiving + compression, so today I have a "magic" bash function that can extract almost any format.
  Then for compressing, I only use zip, which doesn't need any args other than the archive name and the thing you're compressing. It needs -r when recursing on dirs, but unlike "eXtract" and "Ze", that's a good mnemonic.

80s programmers hated Unix, btw. Look up Unix Haters Handbook, it's a free and funny read
- They also hated their local sysadmin. BOFH still holds up in a few key ways.
  
  Thanks. I didn't know there was a real band called "The Pipi Pickers" and I might have lived on happily without that knowledge.
- Good thing GNU's not Unix
- Unix Haters Handbook
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook
  Didn't knew this. It has 360 pages, wow!
  EDIT:
  The Macintosh on which I type this has 64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM?
  hehe
- Here we go
  
  I prefer the MIT link, it's faster 😁
  https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
- Unix does so many stupid things and we're still stuck with some of them. Especially the terminal section still applies today.

Hey buddy, if I fix one bug and cause three more, it's called job security. Where's my medal?
- Getting to keep your job is your medal then.
- I have to say, I'm pretty sure those guys were in the past too.

I once had an intern attempt to install sudo using NPM and when that didn't work he asked ChatGPT "Why can't I install sudo from NPM?" while I'm trying to explain it to him.
He was smart, but somehow knew very little about commercial computers despite being on the verge of getting his master's in computer science.
- "Wait why can't I install windows iso from vscode extension store?"

Hey now. Searching stack overflow circia 2011 to 2018 was an Art. You had to know enough to find the correct question that wasn't deleted because a mod thought it was a duplicate of another question
- Also to find the actual correct answer three comments down because the one that was voted highest worked, but was actually a really shit way to do the thing being asked
  
  I often found the correct answers in the comments of an answer
- Before that you had to hang out on flipside or other gamedev sites and show your worthiness before begging for information.
  I was so proud when they shared the DS hack (basically a homebrew SDK made by trial and error by some people) so that I could make small games on it.
- After a while you got know which stack overflow questions were a waste of time, and you used that knowledge for years.

One of my favourite game dev stories from the 1980s is the story of Elite. It was a game people thought couldn't be made. Most devs thought hardware wasn't powerful enough and publishers thought it wouldn't be fun enough.
It was one of the first properly 3D open world video games ever made. I think when it released it sold nearly as many copies as there were home computers that could run it.
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
There's a fantastic video about it here: https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I
- In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
  Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer's memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.
- the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape
  Holy hell, that is OLD old. We're talking about the beginnings of digital time here. Had the first web constellations formed yet? How fast did you crank your CPU?
  
  Yeah, I played it a lot, and a similar one called aviator which was a kinda flight sim. There wasn't really much of an internet back then but stuff was easy to copy on tapes.
  
  You couldn't crank your CPU in the olden days, it'd make games run in fast forward.
- Elite Dangerous is the most recent installment of the series started by that game

I feel attacked by "how to center div 2025"
- Super easy!
  html
  
  <center> <div> </div> </center>
- css
  
  .parent { display: grid; place-items: center; }
  couldn't be easier in 2025.
  
  probably a lot less performant than doing it the old fashioned way. sometimes that matters. you should have the non-grid non-flex method half committed to memory. abusing flex or grid to save 2 lines of code is not a great practice, and having only one child element is usually a pretty clear sign that flex/grid is the wrong tool for the job
  at the end of the day though do whatever you want, in fact why not just write a javascript function to recenter it every frame at 60fps cause 99.9% of the software 99.9% of people interact with is pure shit made by developers who don't care for users who don't care.
  we live in a slop world, made by and for slop people who love slop. can you tell i've been awake for 30 hours? anyways...

Bottom right has always happened, just create bugs yourself and then fix them to keep your job
- "jubilationtcornpone is a great dev. He closes more tickets than anyone."
- It's easy, just use @media and padding to the left side of the div to put it in the centre for each screen size.
  
  css
  
  div { margin: auto; }

It's 2025 and I have no idea what the current way to center something is. Then again, my job is that of a backend engineer so it's rare I'm outputting anything that isn't a log statement. They can pry tables and center tags from my cold, aging hands.
- It’s
  <center>
  , obviously.
- IMO tables should be more used for... tabular data. Shocking, I know, but the amount of websites that try to emulate a table with divs and uls out there is crazy.

The missing middle section was documentation and QA getting worse
- Well yea, when you train the entire 2nd generation of coders on a book that is “For dummies” what did you expect?
  
  Don't forget the third gen's JavaScript: The Good Parts

The fact that the div center search needs a year on it got me lol
Loving my nearly frontend free development life. I use Stackoverflow or Google maybe 2-3 times a month these days, not sure if I qualify for the upper row :(

People have been hm unable to quit vim since before I was born.
- Some say they are still trapped there, to this day...
  
  May the :helpgrep be ever on their side
- I swore up & down that I'd learn at least two ways of exiting VIM. I even went through basic training to learn all the shortcuts, but it interfered with my regular workflow, so I dropped it "for a bit". It's been a year and I can't remember a damn thing.

I recently learned you can't put a form into another form

Yeah OK, but back then, an office suite was like 500 LOC.

I'm 2 from the top, 3 from the bottom.
- my friend there are only 2 rows
  
  I read that as he created a game in assembly, and can't quit vim. Whether technically or sexually is up to OP to say. And what's the game?

I'm 19 and in the past, apparently.
- I turned 40 two days ago. Get off my lawn!
  
  When you turn 40 do they issue you a lawn or do you not turn 40 until you have a lawn?