Some of you are reblogging because you think its funny that programmers would talk to ducks. I’m reblogging because I think its funny picturing a programmer explaining their code, realizing what they did when they explain the bad code, then grabbing the strangling the duck while yelling “WHY WAS THE FIX THAT SIMPLE!? AM I GOING BLIND!”
AS A PROGRAMMER I CAN TELL YOU THAT THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU FUCKING DO WE HAD TO BAN THE DUCKS FROM MY CLASSES BECAUSE EVERYONE WOULD FLIP THE DUCK OR THROW IT AT A WALL OR SOMETHING WHEN THEY FIGURED OUT THE PROBLEM IN THEIR CODE
so that’s the function of a rubber duck
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I work at a startup and part of the onboarding package you get when you first start working here now includes a rubber duck. We also have a bigger version of the duck for the extra hard problems. Sometimes one duck doesn’t cut it and you need to borrow your neighbors to get more ducks on the problem. One time we couldn’t figure out why something wasn’t working right so we assembled the counsel of ducks and by the grace of the Duck Gods were we able to finally come to a solution. These ducks have saved many lives and should be respected for the heroes they are.
I use this for writing, actually. Explain what I’m doing and what I want to do and the different ways i can get to point B from A, as well as the different problems, amazingly working them out as I explain why I could or couldn’t the different things. I love the Rubber Duck theory.
Former programmer, can confirm. We didn’t have a duck in our office so our other programmer, who I shared a space with, used me as a duck proxy. (For the explaining, not the throwing.)
There was more than one day where I’d casually hear “Hey can you be a duck for a minute?”
Justice League Action | Missing the Mark | Episode 14: When famous actor Mark Hamill is kidnapped by master villain The Joker it will take all his voice acting skills to escape. (x)
In 1942, the US Book Republication Program permitted American publishers
to reprint “exact reproductions” of Germany’s scientific texts without
payment; seventy-five years later, the fate of this scientific knowledge
forms the basis of a “natural experiment” analysed by Barbara Biasi and
Petra Moser for The Center for Economic and Policy Research, who
compare the fate of these texts to their contemporaries who didn’t have
this semi-public-domain existence.
Here’s the headline finding: “This artificial removal of copyright
barriers led to a 25% decline in prices, and a 67% increase in
citations. These results suggest that restrictive copyright policies
slow down the progress of science considerably.”
