[about3fitty]

I found them in 2015 when I was maintaining a legacy app for a university.

The developer that implemented them could have used a few bools but decided to cram it all into one byte using bitwise operators because they were trying to seem smart/clever.

This was a web app, not a microcontroller or some other tightly constrained environment.

One should not have to worry about solar flares! Heh.

[sroussey]

> trying to seem smart/clever.

Maybe. Every time I write something I consider clever, I often regret it later.

But young people in particular tend to write code using things they don’t need because they want experience in those things. (Just look at people using kubernetes long before there is any need as an example). Where and when this is done can be good or bad, it depends.

Even in a web app, you might want to pack bools into bytes depending on what you are doing. For example, I’ve done stuff with deck.gl and moving massive amounts of data between webworkers and the size of data is material.

It did take a beat to consider an example though, so I do appreciate your point.

Coming from a double major including EE though, all I have to say is that everyone’s code everywhere is just a bunch of NOR gates. Now if you want to increase your salary, looking up why I say “everything is NOR” won’t be useful. But if you are curious, it is interesting to see how one Boolean operand can implement everything.

[mewpmewp2]

I can understand writing your own instance and deployment "orchestrator", but I would not consider trying k8s for fun, because it just seems like some arbitrary config you have to learn for something someone else has built.

[jfyi]

> trying to seem smart/clever

Nobody that uses bit flags do it because they think it makes them look clever. If anything they believe it looks like using the most basic of tools.

> One should not have to worry about solar flares!

Do you legitimately believe that a bool is immune to this? Yeah, I get this a joke, but it's one told from a conceit.

This whole post comes off as condescending to cover up a failure to understand something basic.

I get it, someone called you out on it at some point in your life and you have decided to strike back, but come on... do you really think you benefit from this display?

[Apfel]

I've come across bitwise shift operators literally once in enterprise webapp world, specifically on this precise problem: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12900504/13238134.

I made a concerted effort to understand the code before I made any effort to adapt it to the repo I was working on. I'm glad I did (although honestly, it wasn't in the remotest bit necessary to solve the task at hand!)