A potential use for macro program when bored

[gooddragon1]

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[Samm]

This sort of idea reminds me of people writing shell scripts on Linux/MacOS to speed up bits of their workflow or life. I never got around to doing this kind of thing. Often out of the box programs let you do the thing you want anyway, so I just used those.

I find that because so many people are writing software, it's incredibly hard to write software that hasn't been done before and is really useful. That said, there's nothing stopping you from trying things yourself. Solving problems that other people have solved in the past can be a great way to learn things.

The reason I don't do this myself, is that I find it a bit too similar to my day job, and in my off-time I'd rather do something else.

[veti]

I find that because so many people are writing software, it's incredibly hard to write software that hasn't been done before and is really useful. That said, there's nothing stopping you from trying things yourself. Solving problems that other people have solved in the past can be a great way to learn things.

From one perspective, "solving problems that people have solved in the past" describes pretty much my entire career.

From another perspective, every problem is in fact unique because it occurs in a unique situation with its own set of constraints and resources, no combination of which is ever likely to repeat exactly.

Having said all that, I find it hard to figure out exactly what problem OP is trying to solve, unless it's "what can you do with a macro programmer when [really, really] bored?".

[Manga Shoggoth]

Having said all that, I find it hard to figure out exactly what problem OP is trying to solve, unless it's "what can you do with a macro programmer when [really, really] bored?".

One of my managers had the motto "There's nothing more dangerous than a bored programmer".

[Willie the Duck]

One of my managers had the motto "There's nothing more dangerous than a bored programmer".

Speaking as a manager of hopefully-not-bored programmers, this has a lot of resonance for me.

[Samm]

Speaking as a manager of hopefully-not-bored programmers, this has a lot of resonance for me.

Do you have any stories?

I'm working on my PhD, so I work mainly alone. I probably have questionable development practices because of this. So, I haven't really worked in a large group of programmers with a "manager".

[Chronos]

As the saying goes, good programmers write good code. Great programmers steal good code.

[Willie the Duck]

Do you have any stories?

I'm working on my PhD, so I work mainly alone. I probably have questionable development practices because of this. So, I haven't really worked in a large group of programmers with a "manager".

I work for a corporation that would have trouble with me sharing of specific examples, so any story would end up having a lot substitutions (say, working on the Froofram account for J. C. Dithers & Co. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blondie_(comic_strip))). Suffice to say, programmers are, in general, fairly bright individuals who can solve a lot of problems, but occasionally need someone making sure that the problem they solve is the one being requested (within the budget, and within a stone's throw of on time). I guess the biggest somewhat concrete example I can give is one of my team deciding to 'fix' a piece of ham-handed code in a report-production program. Now, the code there was one of those accumulation by accretion constructs that was in no way how you would have designed it if starting from scratch, and it was on the long list of things to update. However, one of the challenges of fixing it was that an intermediate table created by the program was used by another program of which said programmer wasn't aware. It of course got caught in Dev (speaking of questionable development practices --I've heard about people who do their development work on their production platforms), but if that weren't the case it would have been a great big mess. Great example of Chesterton's Fence, and the kind of thing that might not come up in your situation.

[Manga Shoggoth]

Do you have any stories?

Well, my second project with my current Employer had the programming team in a room with nothing to do, and a new and interesting phone system with the instruction cards. So naturally we started to experiment to see what we could do.

As it turns out, if you programmed phone A to forward its calls to phone B, and phone B to forward its calls to phone A, it locked both phones out of the system. Fortunately we managed to unlock them, but we might have disrupted the local exchange for a little while...