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.
Python is only good for short programs
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.
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
Programing is a lot less important than people and team dynamics
Dynamically typed languages don’t scale. Large project bases become hard to maintain, read and refactor.
Basic type errors which should be found in compilation become runtime errors or unexpected behavior.
Tools that use a GUI are just as good (if not better) than their CLI equivalents in most cases. There’s a certain kind of dev that just gets a superiority complex about using CLI stuff.
The big thing you can do from the command line is script it.
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.
I find that S-expressions are the best syntax for programming languages. And in general infix operators are inferior to either prefix or postfix notation.
In case you haven’t heard, Factor just had a new stable release, and is tons of fun for postfix enthusiasts.
I never understood how concatenative programmers can hold the current state of the stack in their head and never get confused about what is where, especially when changing complex 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.
Using single character variable names is always bad practice
Most modern software is way too complex for what it actually does.
Composition over inheritance has become a meme that people repeat without understanding. Both have their uses, but if composition is all you use, then you’re using a hammer on everything. There is no silver bullet in life and most undeniably not in programming.
Also, electron has a reason for existing. If it didn’t have a use, it wouldn’t have the number of users it has. You can’t tell me in all seriousness that Qt, Gtk, Swing, Tkinter is easier to use than electron for the common developer.
My take is that no matter which language you are using, and no matter the field you work in, you will always have something to learn.
After 4 years of professional development, I rated my knowledge of C++ at 7/10. After 8 years, I rated it 4/10. After 15 years, I can confidently say 6.5/10.
Amen. I once had an interview where they asked what my skill is with .net on a scale of 1 - 10. I answered 6.5 even though at the time I had been doing it for 7 years. They looked annoyed and said they were looking for someone who was a 10. I countered with nobody is a 10, not them or even the people working on the framework itself. I didn’t pass the interview and I think this question was why.
As a hiring manager, I can understand why you didn’t get the job. I agree that it’s not a “good” question, sure, but when you’re hiring for a job where the demand is high because a lot is on the line, the last thing you’re going to do is hire someone who says their skills are “6.5/10” after almost a decade of experience. They wanted to hear how confident you were in your ability to solve problems with .NET. They didn’t want to hear “aCtUaLlY, nO oNe Is PeRfEcT.” They likely hired the person who said “gee, I feel like my skills are 10/10 after all these years of experience of problem solving. So far there hasn’t been a problem I couldn’t solve with .NET!” That gives the hiring manager way more confidence than something along the lines of “6.5/10 after almost a decade, but hire me because no one is perfect.” (I am over simplifying what you said, because this is potentially how they remembered you.)
Unfortunately, interviews for developer jobs can be a bit of a crap shoot.
They wanted to hear how confident you were in your ability to solve problems with .NET. They didn’t want to hear “aCtUaLlY, nO oNe Is PeRfEcT.”
Yeah, I mean no shit, with hindsight it’s obvious they were looking for the 10/10 answer. I was kicking myself for days afterwards because that’s the only question I felt I answered “wrong”. Tech interviews are such a shit show though that you can start to overthink things as an interviewee. Also, an important aspect of the question that I didn’t mention was they specified “1 is completely new, and 10 is working at Microsoft on the .net framework itself”. The question caught me off guard. I have literally no idea what working at Microsoft on the framework is like. In that context being a 10/10 felt like being among the most knowledgeable person of c# of all time. Could I work on the framework itself? Idk maybe, I’ve never thought about it, I don’t even know what their day to day is. I should’ve just said 10/10 though, it was a dev II position to work on a web app, it wouldn’t have been that hard.
Refactoring is something that should be constantly done in a code base, for every story. As soon as people get scared about changing things the codebase is on the road to being legacy.
Only if the code base is well tested.
Edit: always add tests when you change code that doesn’t have tests.
Been with a lot of codebases that had no unit tests at all and everyone was afraid to change anything because the QA process could take weeks to months.
The result is you have a codebase that ages like milk.
Python, and dynamically typed languages in general, are known as being great for beginners. However, I feel that while they’re fun for beginners, they should only be used if you really know what you’re doing, as the code can get messy real fast without some guard rails in place (static typing being a big one).
Disagree on this one, even though I can see where you are coming from. I first learnt programming in Java, and it gave me massive problems to understand the structure and typings. Obviously Java isn’t the most beautiful language anyways, but once I picked up python it started to click for me on how to solve problems, because I didn’t have to think about that many things. I could just go for it. Yes, my code was messy in the beginning, but I wasn’t working on any important projects. It was just for fun.
So I think learning how to solve problems is as important as writing clean code. And python really helped me with that.
I’d actually argue Python stops people learning how to solve problems.
I love teaching juniors and have done so for 10 years but I’ve noticed in the last 4-5 years since Python became the popular choice at universities Graduates aren’t learning anything about Static Types, Memory Management, Object Oriented Programming, Data Encapsulation, Composition, Service Oriented Architecture, etc…
I love creating small UI projects for Graduates because it lets you give them small problems with instant feedback and increasingly graduates are spending their entire time completely stuck/terrified of types in Typescript and this isn’t tricky stuff. its usually hello world level React Functional Components.
Those other concepts were created to help make solving problems easier and each has their strengths and weaknesses but most Python Dev’s are coming through only knowing how to lay out a small amount of procedural logic.
