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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • This works as a general guideline, but sometimes you aren’t able to write the code in a way that truly self-documents.
    If you come back to a function after a month and need half an hour to understand it, you should probably add some comments explaining what was done and why it was done that way (in addition to considering if you should perhaps rewrite it entirely).
    If your code is going to be used by third parties, you almost always need more documentation than the raw code.

    Yes documentation can become obsolete. So constrain its use to cases where it actually adds clarity and commit to keeping it up to date with the evolving code.


  • wols@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlIn case you forgot.
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    1 year ago

    Extra steps that guarantee you don’t accidentally treat an integer as if it were a string or an array and get a runtime exception.
    With generics, the compiler can prove that the thing you’re passing to that function is actually something the function can use.

    Really what you’re doing if you’re honest, is doing the compiler’s work: hmm inside this function I access this field on this parameter. Can I pass an argument of such and such type here? Lemme check if it has that field. Forgot to check? Or were mistaken? Runtime error! If you’re lucky, you caught it before production.

    Not to mention that types communicate intent. It’s no fun trying to figure out how to use a library that has bad/missing documentation. But it’s a hell of a lot easier if you don’t need to guess what type of arguments its functions can handle.


  • wols@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlMy poor RAM...
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    1 year ago

    The point is that you’re not fixing the problem, you’re just masking it (and one could even argue enabling it).

    The same way adding another 4 lane highway doesn’t fix traffic long term (increasing highway throughput leads to more people leads to more cars leads to congestion all over again) simply adding more RAM is only a temporary solution.

    Developers use the excuse of people having access to more RAM as justification to produce more and more bloated software. In 5 years you’ll likely struggle even with 32GiB, because everything uses more.
    That’s not sustainable, and it’s not necessary.


  • I think they meant the only language we transpile to for the express reason that working with it directly is so unpleasant.

    Java is not transpiled to another language intended for human use, it’s compiled to JVM bytecode.

    People don’t usually develop software directly in the IR of LLVM. They do develop software using vanilla JavaScript.




  • Many of the programming languages that are regularly the butt of everyone’s jokes don’t just allow you to use them badly, they make it easy to do so, sometimes easier than using them well.
    This is not a good thing. A good language should

    • be well suited to the task at hand
    • be easy to use correctly
    • be hard to use incorrectly

    The reality is that the average software developer barely knows best practices, much less how to apply them effectively.
    This fact, combined with languages that make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot leads to lots of bad code in the wild.

    Tangentially related rant

    We should attack this problem from both directions: improve developers but also improve languages.
    Sometimes that means replacing them with new languages that are designed on top of years of knowledge that we didn’t have when these old languages were being designed.

    There seems to be a certain cynicism (especially from some more senior developers) about new languages.
    I’ve heard stuff like: every other day a new programming language is invented, it’s all just a fad, they add nothing new, all the existing languages could already do all the things the new ones can, etc.
    To me this misses the point. New languages have the advantage of years of knowledge accrued in the industry along with general technological advancements, allowing them to be safer, more ergonomic, and more efficient.
    Sure, we can also improve existing languages (and should, and do) but often times for one reason or another (backwards compatibility, implementation effort, the wider technological ecosystem, dogma, politics, etc.) old quirks and deficiencies stay.

    Even for experienced developers who know how to use their language of choice well, there can be unnecessary cognitive burden caused by poor language design. The more your language helps you automatically avoid mistakes, the more you can focus on actually developing software.

    We should embrace new languages when they lead to more good code and less bad code.