[OT] Re: Music while in a coding session...

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.)