If you don’t add comments, even rudimentary ones, or you don’t use a naming convention that accurately describes the variables or the functions, you’re a bad programmer. It doesn’t matter if you know what it does now, just wait until you need to know what it does in 6 months and you have to stop what you’re doing an decipher it.
it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what it does now
If I don’t know what it does now my comment of “I have no idea wtf this does” won’t help me in 6 months.
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.
Not sure if these are hot takes:
- Difficult to test == poorly designed
- Code review is overrated and often poorly executed, most things should be checked automatically (review should still be done though)
- Which programming language doesn’t matter (within reason), while amount of programming languages matters a lot
Compiler checked typing is strictly superior to dynamic typing. Any criticism of it is either ignorance, only applicable to older languages or a temporarily missing feature from the current languages.
Using dynamic languages is understandable for a lot of language “external” reasons, just that I really feel like there’s no good argument for it.
SPAs are mostly garbage, and the internet has been irreparably damaged by lazy devs chasing trends just to building simple sites with overly complicated fe frameworks.
90% of the internet actually should just be rendered server side with a bit of js for interactivity. JQuery was fine at the time, Javascript is better now and Alpinejs is actually awesome. Nowadays, REST w/HTMX and HATEOAS is the most productive, painless and enjoyable web development can get. Minimal dependencies, tiny file sizes, fast and simple.
Unless your web site needs to work offline (it probably doesn’t), or it has to manage client state for dozen/hundreds of data points (e.g. Google Maps), you don’t need a SPA. If your site only needs to track minimal state, just use a good SSR web framework (Rails, asp.net, Django, whatever).
I’m still hoping for browsers to become some kind of open standard application environments and web apps to become actual apps running on this environment.
How are browser not that already? What’s missing?
They are an open standard and used to make many thousands of apps.
I am not smart enough to effectively code with certain languages and design patterns and that’s ok. There is nothing wrong with accessibility being prioritized or with making tradeoffs for the sake of reducing complexity.
Agile in it’s current implementation with excessive meetings wastes more time than the mistakes it tries to avoid.
Hot take: people who don’t like code reviews have never been part of a good code review culture.
Programing is a lot less important than people and team dynamics
Computer hardware has been getting faster and faster for decades at this point, but my computer still slows down. Like WTF. The dumbass programmers take the extra power given to them and squander it instead of optimizing their code. Microsoft word could run pretty well on a windows 98 PC, but the new Word can slow down PCs that are 5-10 years old. Programmers are complete idiots sometimes…
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.
Go with what works
Error messages should contain the information that caused the error. Your average Microsoft error “error 37253” is worthless to me
Keep functions or methods short. Anything longer than 20 - 50 lines is likely too long
Comment why is happening, not what
PHP is actually a really nice language to work with both for web and command line utils
Don’t over engineer, KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid
SOLID is quite okay but sometimes there are solid reasons to break those rules
MVC is a PITA in practice, avoid it when possible
Your average Microsoft error “error 37253” is worthless to me
This is a security thing. A descriptive error message is useful for troubleshooting, but an error message that is useful enough can also give away information about architecture (especially if the application uses remote resources). Instead, provide an error code and have the user contact support to look up what the error means, and support can walk the user through troubleshooting without revealing architecture info.
Another reason can be i18n/l10n: Instead of keeping translations for thousands of error messages, you just need to translate “An Error Has Occurred: {errnum}”
Those benefits both make sense, but are those really the original motivation for Microsoft designing the Blue Screen of Death this way? They sound more like retroactive justifications, especially since BSODs were around well before security and internationalization were common concerns.
Linux has something similar, kernel panics. However, with Linux you get useful information dumped on your screen.
Nothing gets logged on Linux either, just like windows and that makes sense. The kernel itself messed up and can’t trust its own memory anymore. Writing to disk may cause you to fuck up your disk, so you simply stop everything.
Still though, Linux dumps useful info whereas windows just gives you this dumb useless code.
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.
Using single character variable names is always bad practice
Mostly agree. I’m ok with single characters in a one line / single expression lambda, but that’s the only time I’m ok with it.
PHP aint all that bad
