Python is legitimately the best language by far for the vast majority of non-performance critical tasks, and most tasks that need to be developed for are not performance critical.
Duplicate code can be a code smell, but it’s far better to have the same function definition or code block appear twice in the code than extracting a function that tightly couples two components that should not be coupled at all.
See Write Everything Twice (WET) principle.
Dynamic typing is insane. You have to keep track of the type of absolutely everything, in your head. It’s like the assembly of type systems, except it makes your program slower instead of faster.
Nothing like trying to make sense of code you come across and all the function parameters have unhelpful names, are not primitive types, and have no type information whatsoever. Then you get to crawl through the entire thing to make sense of it.
You can do typing through the compiler at build time, or you can do typing with guard statements at run time. You always end up doing typing tho
Until you know a few very different languages, you don’t know what a good language is, so just relax on having opinions about which languages are better. You don’t need those opinions. They just get in your way.
Don’t even worry about what your first language is. The CS snobs used to say BASIC causes brain damage and that us '80s microcomputer kids were permanently ruined … but that was wrong. JavaScript is fine, C# is fine … as long as you don’t stop there.
(One of my first programming languages after BASIC was ZZT-OOP, the scripting language for Tim Sweeney’s first published game, back when Epic Games was called Potomac Computer Systems. It doesn’t have numbers. If you want to count something, you can move objects around on the game board to count it. If ZZT-OOP doesn’t cause brain damage, no language will.)
Please don’t say the new language you’re being asked to learn is “unintuitive”. That’s just a rude word for “not yet familiar to me”. So what if the first language you used required curly braces, and the next one you learn doesn’t? So what if type inference means that you don’t have to write
inton your ints? You’ll get used to it.You learned how to use curly braces, and you’ll learn how to use something else too. You’re smart. You can cope with indentation rules or significant capitalization or funny punctuation. The idea that some features are “unintuitive” rather than merely temporarily unfamiliar is just getting in your way.
Please don’t say the new language you’re being asked to learn is “unintuitive”. That’s just a rude word for “not yet familiar to me”…The idea that some features are “unintuitive” rather than merely temporarily unfamiliar is just getting in your way.
Well i mean… that’s kinda what “unintuitive” means. Intuitive, i.e. natural/obvious/without effort. Having to gain familiarity sorta literally means it’s not that, thus unintuitive.
I dont disagree with your sentiment, but these people are using the correct term. For example, python len(object) instead of obj.len() trips me up to this day because 99% of the time i think [thing] -> [action], and most language constructs encourage that. If I still regularly type an object name, and then have to scroll the cursor back over and type “len(”, i cant possibly be using my intuition. It’s not the language’s “fault” - because it’s not really “wrong” - but it is unintuitive.
No programming language is “natural/obvious/without effort”.
You could say that about anything. Of course you have to learn something the first time and it’s “unintuitive” then. Intuition is literally an expectation based on prior experience.
Intuitive patterns exist in programming languages. For example, most conditionals are denoted with “if”, “else”, and “while”. You would find it intuitive if a new programming language adhered to that. You’d find it unintuitive if the conditionals were denoted with “dnwwkcoeo”, “wowpekg cneo”, and “coebemal”.
Please don’t say the new language you’re being asked to learn is “unintuitive”. That’s just a rude word for “not yet familiar to me”.
Yeah. I’ve written in six or so different languages and am using Go now for the first time. Even then, I’m trying to be optimistic and acknowledge things are just different or annoying for me. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with the language.
Microsoft has not made a good product. Ever. Every program has issues that should not be there if you’re selling it. Yet they get away with it
typescript? i know its a bandaid on a severed leg at this point but still
Using single character variable names is always bad practice
As an embedded firmware guy for 10ish years:
C can die in a fire. It’s “simplicity” hides the emergent complexity by using it as it has nearly no compile time checks for anything and nearly no potential for sensible abstraction. It’s like walking on an infinite tight rope in fog while an earth quake is happening.
For completely different reasons: The same is true for C++ but to a far lesser extent.
Carbon? Just what we were all hoping for, yet another programming language from Google. They can keep it.
Web development feels like it’s stuck in the early 2000’s. I’ve ranted a lot about it over the years but I just don’t know how everyone is okay with it. I’m sure tons of people will disagree.
HTML is bad. The language itself feels unintuitive and is clunky compared to modern markdown languages, and let’s be honest, your webpage just consists of nested
<div>tags.CSS is bad. Who knew styling can be so unintuitive and unmanageable? Maybe it made sense 25 years ago, but now it’s just terrible. It’s very clunkily integrated with HTML too in my opinion. Styling and markdown should be one easier to use language where 50% of it isn’t deprecated.
Javascript has been memed to death so I won’t even go there. Typescript is OK I suppose.
And now for my hottest take: ~10+ years ago I saw web building tools like Wix and I completely expected web development to head in the direction using a GUI to create, style, and script from one interface, even allowing you to create and see dynamic content instantly. I’ve seen competitors and waited for “the big one” that’s actually free and open source and good enough to be used professionally. It never happened. Web dev has just gone backwards and stuck in its old ways, now it’s a bloated mess that takes way more time than it deserves.
The Godot engine is actually a pretty good option for creating GUI apps and it’s exactly what I envisioned web dev should’ve been this past decade. One language, intuitive interface, simple theming and easy rapid development… Shame it never happened.</div>
One language
Godot has native support for 3 languages and community support currently built for like 6 other languages.
But the main language is GDScript, everything else is an alternative if you prefer not to use it.
Most modern software is way too complex for what it actually does.
Shorter code is almost always better.
Should you use a class? Should you use a Factory pattern or some other pattern? Should you reorganize your code? Whichever results in the least code is probably best.
A nice thing about code length is it’s objective. We can argue all day about which design pattern makes more sense, but we can agree on which of two implementations is shorter.
It takes a damn good abstraction to beat having shorter code.
I mostly agree with this but more than shorter code I value readability, I would rather take 3 lines to be clear to any developer than use some obscure or easy to misunderstand structure to write it in 1.
Yep. And three functions is better than one for legibility even if one would be fewer lines of code
JS is horse shit. Instead of trying to improve it or using that high level scripting language as a compilation target (wtf?!), we should deprecate it entirely and put all efforts into web assembly.
Python is only good for short programs
Oh boy, here we go (inhales):
Agile isn’t that bad. People just believe they are more productive if they are “heads down” and not held accountable for what they write/do.
Functional programming isn’t that great and doesn’t solve all of the world’s problems; it just pushes the issues with state to other parts of your design, and doesn’t scale well in deeply nested solutions.
IDEs with proper code support (i.e. automatic structure analysis, autocomplete, etc.) are one of the best ways to deal with a large codebase that needs refactoring. Doing widescale refactors without one is asking for trouble. If you believe you don’t need it, either your codebase is just that small (which is fine) or playing with fire.
Much of the advice out there on architecture and tooling isn’t properly contextualized on the codebase, market, and team situation. If you believe you have the One True Architecture Solution, you are naive. (Ex. Microservices, large complex code pipelines, monorepos, etc.) Be especially wary of anything from FAANG engineering blogs unless you are also in another letter of FAANG.
There. Got it out of my system. Have fun dissecting it.
The biggest problem with Agile is bad managers fucking it up. But bad managers will fuck things up no matter which way you do things.
But they’re going to want to somehow see progress, and they’ll leave you alone if they see some cards moving on a board. Even if they have no idea what the cards mean.
Whatever, it’s better than having to do status update meetings.
I can’t speak for your managers, but my past managers didn’t need Agile to f things up. They can do that with anything!
That the entire industry is cyclical and the current trends are yesterday’s anarcisms. Oop Vs functional, separating concerns Vs vertical slices, there’s examples all over the place.
All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.
