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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • wols@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlGot no time to code
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    3 months ago

    Bonus: good tests can also serve as technical documentation.

    Though I have to disagree with the notion that documentation is as important or more so than code.
    Documentation is certainly near the top of the list and often undervalued. I’ve worked on a project where documentation was lacking and it was painful to say the least.
    Without documentation, changing or adding features can be a nightmare. Investigating bugs and offering support is also very difficult. But without code, you have nothing. No product, no users, no value.

    There are (inferior) substitutes for documentation: specialized team knowledge, general technical expertise. These alternative pools of knowledge can be leveraged to create and improve documentation incrementally.
    There’s no replacement for the actual functionality of your applications.


  • 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.



  • 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.


  • I haven’t used a different browser in a good while, so I’m not sure that these issues don’t exist elsewhere, but here’s a few:

    For a very long time after the rework, reordering tabs was not possible. Only recently was this added again. But there seems to be no acceleration, so moving an old tab to the front takes forever. Even worse, this feature is still not available for private tabs (since you can’t select those at all).

    Quite often when I switch to the tab overview, it doesn’t automatically scroll to my current tab so I need to do that manually.

    I’m also not a fan of the “jump back in” view that shows up every so often instead of the content of my tab. Why they would assume I’m interested in anything besides what I intentionally opened is beyond me.

    Creating a new tab is more cumbersome than it needs to be. I think you were able to do that by scrolling to the right on the address bar of the rightmost tab. A dedicated button would be even better.

    I think it’s a great browser, and pretty much the only one I use, but in my experience everything does not work perfectly.