Programming

Designing good UX can be as difficult as writing good code.

Source: Im UI/UX designer and project manager and also QA/QC and also devops and also write the specs and documentation. The only thing I dont do is write the code, DB schema and architecture . The hardest of all those roles is UX. The easiest is project management ("Did anything go tits-up today? No? Well carry on, then ")

Biases: I have no formal training in any of those things and was actually hired as a helpdesk tech.

I actually like C.

MATLAB is an okay programming language when used in the right context. It’s intended for scientific applications, so trying to do your standard object oriented programming with it gets weird. I think we forget that some things were made for a specific purpose- you know, a hammer can’t do everything and all that.

JavaScript isn't bad. Sure it has its quirks, but it's not as bad as everyone makes it sound it is

My hot take: Vi, make and C would have gone the way of COBOL a long time ago if it wasn't for a lot of programmers thinking "my tools are more difficult to use, hence I'm a better programmer".

If white space carries any function that the compiler/interpreter needs to know about like structure or scope, it's probably not a very good programming language.

Not everyone can or even should learn programming.

Not sure about here but is was a hot take on reddit:
Pointers are not that hard and really useful

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.

I really love the project structure of C++. I know that it is an archaic design developed like this due to lack of resources, but I find packages extremely offputting.

The first reason is that splitting declaration and implementation across files makes it easier to figure out what something does.

Second reason is that I feel that I have more control over libraries and packages that have to be manually added to a project rather than using a package manager.

Third, I feel like modern languages iterate over too many versions too fast. C++ has version releases too, but I feel that versioning is handled better from time, compatibility and stability point of view.

PHP aint all that bad

SQL is the core language that everyone should be required to learn first and foremost.

When writing software that will be deployed to a production environment, it's better to slow down and take the time needed to write a higher quality, more durable solution than to rush and quickly kick a product out the door.

I don't know why this is a hot take, but sometimes it feels like it is.

Assembly is fun because it makes you feel like a wizard, even if you're bad and it's not an efficient way to code. Everyone should try it once.

Carbon? Just what we were all hoping for, yet another programming language from Google. They can keep it.

GNU make is confusing as hell and shouldn't be used in today's world.

Python is stupid. Using non printable characters as anything other than token separation is just asking for trouble.

If programmers stick to what they know and not try to solve every problem at hand with the latest thing/programming language they've learned then there would be fewer bugs and projects would end by the estimated dates.

TDD is overrated. Code coverage is extremely overrated. Both of these tend to lead to a morass of tests that prove the compiler works at its most basic level while simultaneously generating a surplus of smugness about the whole situation.

Tests have their place. Tests can be, and often are, valuable. But the easier the test is to write, the easier it would've been to just encode it into the type system to begin with.

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.

Most frameworks are garbage and most programmers that use them have no idea how they work and that makes them shitty programmers. I hate when people use frameworks without even knowing why they’re using them.

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.

I am bad at coding and it is a skill that I do not think everyone can achieve to a professional level, thus telling people to "learn to code" is similar to telling them to "just hustle", "hit the bricks and hand out resumes", and other flippant stories that mean you stop having to think about poverty.

That said, I do believe the narrative actually was true for some people at some time. Maybe in the 90s and early 2000s if you were able to cobble together a computer from bits your university was throwing out and you had internet access, you could punch well above your weight. But that certainly was never true for everyone.

(I like to be optimistic about people's ability to learn things, mostly hampered by access, time, and lack of interest, but I went to a boilermaker's course recently to learn how to weld and none of those kids were going to learn how to code even if they were interested, whatever their other skills were.)

Here's another: most code reviews on larger companies are BS, just for show and nitpicking.

I like C# and Visual Studio

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.

SCRUM is good, actually