What are your programming hot takes?
What are your programming hot takes?
896 comments
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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.
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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.
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Only if the code base is well tested.
Edit: always add tests when you change code that doesn’t have tests.
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And also try to make tests that don't have to change if you refactor in future (although there are some exceptions)
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Our company motto is: "leave it cleaner than you found it"
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Who is in the wrong? Your manager, for not giving you time to refactor? Or you for giving him the option?
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Why do you need time to refactor? It is just part of the work you need to do and should be accounted for when doing any other work. IMO a big mistake people make is thinking refactoring is some separate thing they need permission to do. You don't, if you need to make a change in some area refactor it first to make it easier to accept your change, then add your change then refactor to clean up. This is not three separate tasks, just three steps in one task. You should be given enough time to do the whole task, not just part of it.
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Yes please. Many times when I add a feature I end up refactoring some of the code first to better accommodate it.
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thank_you_michael_scott.gif
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We used to call this ‘Code is Cheap’ at my last job - you’re spot on about the value of it
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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.
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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.
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If you only know C and you're looking at Python, the absence of curly braces on code blocks is temporarily unfamiliar to you.
But if you only know Python and you're looking at C, the fact that indentation doesn't matter is temporarily unfamiliar to you.
Once you learn the new language, it's not unfamiliar to you anymore.
"Unintuitive" often suggests that there's something wrong with the language in a global sense, just because it doesn't look like the last one you used — as if the choice to use (or not use) curly braces is natural and anything else is willfully perverse on the part of the language designer.
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Idk, I don't see a problem with saying a new language is unintuitive. For example, in js I still consider the horrible type coercion and the "fix" with the triple-equals very unintuitive indeed. On the flip side, when learning C# I found the multiple ways of making comparisons to be pretty intuitive, and not footguns.
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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.
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ZZT-OOP is fun to work with though, definitely not meant for doing anything more complex than light gameplay, and yet people have done ridiculous things with it.
Though I personally did most of my coding in that vein in MegaZeux with their Robotic language, which is basically ZZT-OOP++.
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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.
This is wise advice for ANY domain of knowledge.
Lotta people get a little fragment of knowledge on something, then shut down their brain and stop accepting new input. But life is change, and to be able to change and learn new things you need to keep your mind open. Being able to relax on having opinions and keep learning and moving along is very important.
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This is very true! Languages being unintuitive also becomes less of an issue the more languages you look into. There will be many concepts that multiple languages have since ultimately they are all trying to do similar things and the more you learn the more you will recognize making it easier to get into even more languages.
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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.
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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.
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I'm not sure that's a hot take outside early uni programmers.
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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
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I like it in modern PHP, it's balanced. As strict or as loose as you need in each context.
Typed function parameters, function returns and object properties.
But otherwise I can make a DateTime object become a string and vice-versa, for example.
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What happens when you coerce a string to a date-and-time but it's not valid?
Where I'm from (Rust), error handling is very strict and very explicit, and that's how it should be. It forces you to properly handle everything that can potentially go wrong, instead of just crashing and looking like a fool.
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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.
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Programing is a lot less important than people and team dynamics
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People can always be replaced, they're irrelevant.
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Sure try to replace the one or two people that hold the whole team together. I've seen it a couple times, a good team disintegrates right after one or two key people leave.
Also, if you replace half the team, prepare for some major learning time whenever the next change is being made. Or after the next deployment. 🤷♂️
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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.
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This take gets colder as you get more experience.
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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.
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Hahaha man I feel you
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The mark of a true master.
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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.
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The big thing you can do from the command line is script it.
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Indeed, the problem with gui apps is when you can’t script them!
I always loved alfred on osx, then loved scripting rofi on linux, only to come back to osx years later and find alfred can’t be invoked with stdin options. It’s damn shame….
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I used to think something like this when I was younger. I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for good gui versions of cli tools. I have come to understand that this is not usually the case and cli tools are more convenient much of the time. I would not classify this as superiority complex, unless I’m being a jerk about it. I don’t care what you use, I just use whatever has the lowest barrier to entry with the most standardization, which is usually the original cli tool.
That said, jetbrains git integration is awesome.
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I agree only when your job function is specifically geared around those tools... Otherwise high quality guis are more valuable.
Just because I can do everything in gdb that I can do in visual studio doesn't mean 99% of most debugging tasks isn't easier and faster in visual studio. Now if my job was specifically aimed at debugging/reverse engineering there are certain things that gdb does better on the CLI... But for most software devs... CLI gdb isn't valuable.
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There are some massive intrinsic advantages of the CLI though, that apply for everyone, not just leetcoders:
- The terminal can remember everything you ever did. Forgotten the command you wrote 2 months ago? You can do a search for it with a tool like
fzfand run the exact same command again. - Communicating with others. GUI programs require step by step instructions, often accompanied by screenshots while CLI may be copy/pasted.
- Combining programs together. There are a few different techniques for combining CLI programs to search/format output, use secrets without ever having them in the clipboard or on disk, monitor something frequently/constantly etc etc
So while I agree with you that there's plently of elitism around the CLI, you do yourself a disservice if you try to avoid it.
- The terminal can remember everything you ever did. Forgotten the command you wrote 2 months ago? You can do a search for it with a tool like
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Just no. CLI can be automated, which makes it superior. It's not a superiority complex, it's a fact. I'm not a minimal wage worker pushing buttons I don't understand. I'm not a technician who learnt your shitty software to do the most basic tasks.
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Aside from automation, CLI can support significantly more complicated apps reliably. It can also be tested more reliably.
GUIs are better for anything simple, and good UX designers can make a moderately complex one, but anything like server administration/git/configs are 100x better on CLI
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This depends a lot on the GUI and the tool. Some cli tools are great alone or for scripting, others benefit from the extra attention to ux and exposure of options that a GUI can offer
For git in particular, I encourage juniors to learn and use the CLI. I find that GUI git clients often do some or all of the following:
- Use non-git terminology that ends up being confusing. "Sync" comes to mind as a frequent offender, I can think of several incompatible things that could refer to.
- Ignore the useful ability to stage your changes
- Don't permit or encourage a review of the changes
- Implement only the basics and make remediation of branching issues difficult
In the worst case, I've seen people end up using the git GUI like a "save" button, blindly commiting and pushing the current state of their code, including to-be-removed print statements and other cruft. Yeah, git cli is a bit complex compared to that, but you gain a lot for that added complexity.
That said, I've definitely jumped into a git GUI from time to time just for a visualization of whenever branching snafu I'm trying to untangle. None of the above invalidates GUIs if you take care to still understand the underlying tool properly!
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I don't know, a tool we use at my work has a git GUI integrated, and it breaks all the time, lol.
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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
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I agree with your first point, but pretty strongly disagree with the other two. Code review is critical. Devs should be discussing changes and design choices. One Dev can not be all things all the time and other people have experience you do not or can remind you of things you forgot. Programming language absolutely matters when you’re not the only dev on the team.
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If code reviews in your org are glorified "styleguide checks", then they are not really code reviews at all.
Also, if you're only getting design input at code review time, that's WWAAYY too late in the process.
Code reviews should be:
- Establishing that the code has proper test coverage (functional correctness VIA coverage, not code observation)
- Establishing that it doesn't have unintended consequences in the ** implementation** (making db calls in a loop, exposing secure information, etc)
- That the implementation is of the high-level design that was already established and agreed upon by the larger development unit.
- A opportunity to ask questions to learn from whoever wrote the code
- An opportunity for the reviewers to teach techniques that could have helped in the code
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Nice, so they are hot takes :D
If the design of a code change is bad, noticing that in the PR stage is not desirable. It should be discussed before someone actually went ahead and implemented it. It can also happen if people misunderstand the architecture, but again, that should be cleared up before actually implementing a change. Code style should be enforced automatically, as should test coverage and performance. Code review is also pretty bad at finding bugs from my experience. That imo leaves very few things where code review is useful that are not nitpicking.
As for programming languages, the amount does matter for individuals and for teams/organisations. A developer who can only use a single language is not very good, and using a many different languages within the same team is not good either.
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Code review is overrated and often poorly executed, most things should be checked automatically (review should still be done though)
I think part of this is caused by the fact that a lot of people are bad at code reviews so they focus on things that a linter could have told you. Being able to read code isn't necessarily the same skill as being able to write it -- as evidenced by the knee jerk reaction to throw out any coffee we didn't write ourselves.
I still create code reviews when I'm working on a project alone because it gives me a different perspective on the changes I've made.
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It’s not that most people are bad at it, they are just out of context.
Like, I am completely swamped with a completely different business area of the code, besides checking for obviously dumb things, what can I really tell about a diff to a very separate part of the code which I may have never worked on before, with business requirements I don’t understand as I was not part of the 10 meetings that happened between the dev of the given ticket and BAs?
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Imo reviews are more for checking that someone didn't drop malware into the code base. It's rare that I get a good review that goes beyond checking for malice.
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Difficult to test == poorly designed
It's pretty much a natural law that GUIs are hard to thoroughly test.
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But does it have to be? I haven't touched non-web GUIs since 15 years, so my perspective on this is limited. And web frontend is not what I would call a well designed system for it's current purpose.
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I've been wanting to make my applications easier to test. The issue is, I don't know what to test. Often my issues are so trivial I notice them immediately.
What are some examples of common things in, let's say a web server, that could be unit tested?
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Good questions, I could probably write a lot, but I'll try to keep it short. I usually apply TDD and there are different schools of thought within it about how to structure the development process. But no matter how exactly you do it, if you focus on writing the tests while writing your code, you won't end up with an application that you then have to figure out how to test.
what to test
Well, what is the application supposed do? That is what you test, the behaviour of the application.
So in a codebase without any tests, the first thing you should write a test for is the happy path. That will probably not be a unit test. So for the web server example, set it up in a test with a file, start it and check if it serves that file.
Then you can add tests for all the error cases and for additional functionality. You can write unit tests for individual components. The ideal places to test are interfaces with clear boundaries. Ideally you should not have to look at the code of a method to be able to write a test for it. In reality that's not always so easy, especially in existing code bases, but if you have to set up more than one mock, it tends to lead to brittle tests.
Every time you encounter a bug/issue, reproduce it in a test first. And do measure code coverage, but don't make it a target, just check for places that are lacking.
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Most modern software is way too complex for what it actually does.
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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).
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Preferring server side rendering is an interesting topic
Client side renderering is currently the preference because the company gets to offload the compute costs of their servers onto the clients' devices
As long as every website has a profit motive, even if it's just a single person trying to save some money on their AWS bills, server side rendering will never become the norm
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The difference between generating JSON and generating HTML is minimal for the server, doesn't seem to me like server side rendered sites have significantly higher server compute costs. Also generally for SPAs, the server has to replicate whatever flow is happening on the client anyway to keep state in line (since the client can't be trusted)
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I do a lot of PHP, so naturally my small projects are PHP. I use a framework called Laravel, and while it is possible to use SPAs or other kinds of shit, I usually choose pure SS rendering with a little bit of VueJS to make some parts reactive. Other than that, it is usually, just pure HTML forms for submitting data. And it works really well.
Yeah yeah, they push the Livewire shit, which I absolutely hate and think is a bad idea, but nobody is forcing me, so that's nice.
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Counter hot take, I do actually like Blazor but it has limitations due to how immature web assembly still is. It also does not solve the problem of being a big complex platform that isn't needed for small simple apps. Of the half dozen projects I've written in Blazor, I'd personally re-write 3 or so in just Razor Pages with Htmx.
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The best codebase I have ever seen and collaborated on was also boring as fuck.
- Small, immutable modules.
- Every new features was coded by extension (the 'o' in S.O.L.I.D)
- All dependencies were resolved by injection.
- All the application life cycle was managed by configurable scopes.
- There was absolutely no boiler plate except for the initial injectors.
- All of the tests were brain-dead and took very minimal effort to write. Tests served both as documentation and specification for modules.
- "Refactoring" was as simple as changing a constructor or a configuration file.
- All the input/output of the modules were configurable streams.
There is more to it, but basically, it was a very strict codebase, and it used a lot of opinionated libraries. Not an easy codebase to understand if you're a newbie, but it was absolutely brain dead to maintain and extend on.
Coding actually took very little time of our day, most of it consisted of researching the best tech or what to add next. I think the codebase was objectively strictly better than all other similar software I've seen and worked on. We joked A LOT when it came time to change something in the app pretending it would take weeks and many 8 pointers, then we'd casually make the change while joking about it.
It might sound mythical and bullshity, and it wasn't perfect, it should be said that dependency injection often come in the form of highly opinionated frameworks, but it really felt like what software development should be. It really felt like engineering, boring and predictable, every PO dreams.
That being said, I given up trying to convince people that having life-cycle logic are over the place and fetching dependencies left and right always lead to chaos. Unfortunately I cannot really tell you guys what the software was about because I am not allowed to, but there was a lot of moving parts (hence why we decided to go with this approach). I will also reiterate that it was boring as fuck. If anything, my hot take would be that most programmers are subconsciously lying to themselves, and prefer to code whatever it is they like, instead of what the codebase need, and using whatever tool they like, instead of the tools the project and the team need. Programming like and engineer is not "fun", programming like a cowboy and ignoring the tests is a whole lot of fun.
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You can always solve a problem by adding more layers of abstraction. Good software design isn't to add more layers of abstractions, it's to solve problems with the minimum amount of abstractions necessary while still having maintainable, scalable code.
There are benefits to abstraction but they also have downsides. They can complicate code and make code harder to read.
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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.
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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
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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.
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In unit testing, a "unit" does not have to be the smallest possible section of code. It can be a while class or module or even set of related classes/modules. Testing individual functions in isolation leads to brittle tests that easily break during refactoring. Testing overall system behaviour results in more robust tests that require fewer changes during refactoring which gives you more confidence then you have not introduced a regression.
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IMO, you should usually test only stable interfaces.
If you have no stable interface all the way into the UI, then you shouldn't test anything all the way into the UI, and focus your tests there. Odds are that your code isn't very good, because it is rare that you don't need anything stable all the way through, but well, "rare" is not the same as "impossible".
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This is the correct comment.
Martin Fowler called them sociable tests. The only way to properly test your units' behavior is to pull in their dependencies. Isolated tests are useless, brittle and slow to write.
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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.
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The programming languages you use, and the variety of languages you learn, deeply influence how you think about software design.
Software would be much more reliable (in general) if Erlang had become one of the dominant languages for development.
Go sacrifices too much for superficial simplicity; but I would like to see a language that's nearly as easy to learn, but has a better type system and fewer footguns.
Unit testing is often overrated. It is not good for discovering or protecting against most bugs.
Build/test/deploy infrastructure is a genuinely hard problem that needs better tooling, particularly for testability.
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Full IDEs kinda suck.
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Some languages really do suck so much they're all but unwriteable by plain text, and need constant compiler tree parsing to get right.
But that's an incentive to quit using bad languages. Write in something you can read and write in ed, and you can hold it in your head.
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Not arguing either side, but I'd love to hear your reasoning.
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Python development without PyCharm (or IntelliJ) and the IdeaVim plugin is unbearable. List usages is a game changer. Don't care much for anything else.
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Yeah, well, that's just Python for you. List usages is now an LSP feature for most languages, so will work with "lesser" editors too.
All that being said, I use Intellij with Java daily, so I can see where you're coming from. But for example Rust or Go works wonderfully with Neovim (or VSCode).
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We use too many libraries. This may be an actual unpopular opinion though. I find that the more a library tries to do, and the more dependencies it has itself, the more hesitant I am to use it. It just feels like a tower of cards ready to fall at any moment.
I'm not a very trusting person and work alone though so this might just be an emotional decision. But it is nice having a project be composed of code that does just what is needed and nothing else. It makes it easier to fix bugs and especially to maintain the code.
I do use libraries, but only if they're absolutely necessary or if they're very focused and don't try to do a million things. It's not about size but complexity.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Heh, I was about to comment how my hot take is that Python is overrated. It's... fine and I don't really have anything against it for the most part, but I greatly prefer Ruby to Python.
I'm speaking purely about the language itself here, not any libraries available for it (since someone will always point out how great Python is for data work).
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My impression at the time was that Ruby and Python both caught on with people who were ready to be done with Perl.
And, later, that Go set out to be a replacement for Java, but ended up being a replacement for Python for people who were ready for type checking and built-in multithreading.
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Oh man, I actually like the language, but you made me think of my own hot take:
Python has inexcusably poor docs.
Just a smattering of examples, which aren't even that good, while failing to report key information like all the parameters a function can take, or all the exceptions it can throw. Any other popular language I can think of has this locked down and it makes things so much easier.
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I really enjoy typescript these days. Is there a Python typed equivalent?
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Python has had syntax support for type annotations for a while now. The Python runtime doesn't enforce the typing at all, but it can be enforced by a linter or by your IDE. And I believe you can introspect the type annotations at runtime, because they are actually part of the syntax.
There's even an alternative way of doing type annotations through specially formatted comments, just in case you might still need to write code that is backwards compatible with Python 2.
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For bigger projects, anything with MANDATORY types is a must for me. Optional, not compiler checked hinting doesn't cut it.
Not that i hate the language, but I do hate the tooling around it. I don't think I've ever had a pleasant experience with setting up a Python project. And all the data stuff is just wrappers for code in other languages, making the packaging story even uglier, even harder.
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You're right now to compromise on this, but you can give yourself mandatory types in Python, using MyPy, if that's your only issue with it.*
Because you don't need elegant subprocess handling, intuitive reliable logging, and don't mind needing a to autonate a linter to check for whitesoace bullshit.*
**Python is my favorite language, actually. Really.
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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.
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