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.
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.
I’m not sure that’s a hot take outside early uni programmers.
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 kinda wanna say… skill issue? But really, dynamic typing is great as long as it fits the problem your solving and you keep your types simple or even just primitive
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.
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.
My point is, you won’t ever try. You’d only use “weak” variables inside the function you’re working on.
It’s explicit when you absolutely need it to be, when the function is being called and you need to know what arguments to pass and what it’ll return
A string being parsed as a date-time is presumably user input, which is potentially invalid.
When you say user, you mean a user of a function? In that case PHP would throw a TypeError, and presumably only happens when developing/testing.
If you mean in production, like when submitting a form, an Exception may be thrown. In which case you catch it and return some error message to the user saying the date string is invalid.
By “user” I mean the person who is using the application.
Using exceptions for handling unexceptional errors (like invalid user input) is a footgun. You don’t know when one might be raised, nor what type it will have, so you can easily forget to catch it and handle it properly, and then your app crashes.
you can easily forget to catch it and handle it properly
Even if I coded the form by hand and that happened, it’s on me, not on the programming language.
But I don’t, I use a framework which handles all that boilerplate validation for me.
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.
Let’s take this one step further. I should be able to get the core ideas in your code by comments and cs 101 level coding (eg basic data structures, loops, and if/then).
This is why code review exists. Writer’s can’t always see what’s wrong with their work, because they have the bias of knowing what was intended. You need a reader to see it with fresh eyes and tell you what parts are confusing.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t try to make it readable in the first place. But reviewing and reading other people’s code is how you get better.
Programing is a lot less important than people and team dynamics
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.
This take gets colder as you get more experience.
The mark of a true master.
Understanding how complex something is, is irriversible. Once you reach that plateau you will always know how much there is you don’t know.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Difficult to test == poorly designed
It’s pretty much a natural law that GUIs are hard to thoroughly test.
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.
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?
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.
Python is only good for short programs
Python is only good for short programs
Was Python designed with enterprise applications in mind?
It sounds like some developers have a Python hammer and they can only envision using that hammer to drive any kind of nail, no matter how poorly.
I mean, it’s still a very nice language. I can see someone, marveled by that, would endeavor to make bigger things with it. I just don’t feel it scales that well.
I agree. The GIL and packaging woes are a good indication that it’s range of applications isn’t as extensive as other tech stacks.
packaging woes
My own hot take is that I hear this criticism of Python a lot, but have never had anyone actually back it up when I ask for more details. And I will be very surprised to hear that it’s a worse situation than Java/TypeScript’s.
We used to have a Python guy at my work. For a lot of LITTLE ETL stuff he created Python projects. In two projects I’ve had to fix up now, he used different tooling. Both those toolings have failed me (Poetry, Conda). I ended up using our CI/CD pipeline code to run my local stuff, because I could not get those things to work.
For comparison, it took me roughly zero seconds to start working on an old Go project.
Python was built in an era where space was expensive and it was only used for small, universal scripts. In that context, having all packages be “system-wide” made sense. All the virtual env shenanigans won’t ever fix that.
In that context, having all packages be “system-wide” made sense. All the virtual env shenanigans won’t ever fix that.
Sorry, but you’ll need to explain this a little bit more to me. That’s precisely what virtual env shenanigans do - make it so that your environment isn’t referencing the system-wide packages. I can totally see that it’s a problem if your virtual env tooling fails to work as expected and you can’t activate your environment (FWIW, simply old
python -m venv venv; source venv/bin/activatehas never let me down in ~10 years of professional programming, but I do believe you when you say that Poetry and Conda have broken on you); but assuming that the tools work, the problem you’ve described completely goes away.
packaging woes
Even with tools like Poetry?
I feel attacked.
By my own Python hammer.
Python should not be used for production environments, or anything facing the user directly. You are only inviting pain and suffering.
Check out home assistant.
I don’t mean it doesn’t work for larger projects. Just that it’s a pain to understand other’s code when you have almost no type information, making it, to me, a no go for that
Larger projects in Python (like homeassistant) tend to use type-hints and enforce them through linters. Essentially, these linters (with a well-setup IDE) turn programming in large Python projects into a very similar experience to programming a statically typed language, except that Python does not need to be compiled (and type-checked) to run it. So you can still run it before you have satisfied the linters, you just can’t commit or push or whatever (depending on project setup).
And yes, these linters and the Python type system are obviously not as good as something like a Go or Rust compiler. But then again, Python is a generalist language: it can do everything, but excels at nothing.
Go and rust are also generalist languages. Basically all main stream programming languages are and are equally as powerful (in terms of what they can do, rather than performance) as each other as they are all Turing complete. So you can emulate c in python or python in c for instance).
Anything you can do in python you can do in basically any other mainstream language. Python is better at some niches than others just like all other languages are with their own niches - and all can be used generally for anything. Python has a lot of libraries that can make it easier to do a large range of things than a lot of other languages - but really so do quite a few of the popular languages these days.
That’s actually a good idea, enforcing it. Still, do these linters protect against misuse? E.g I have an int but place a string on it somewhere?
Yes, in a good dev workflow mypy errors will not pass basic CI tests to get merged. Types are not really a problem in modern Python workflows, you can basically have a better type checker than Java out of the box (which can be improved with static analysis tools). The biggest problem with Python remains performance.
Fair enough, I don’t notice a significant overhead but then a lot of information is inferred by patterns , project structures etc etc
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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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’m thinking more along the line of ubiquitous offline first PWAs. Imagine google doc running offline in a browser and being able to edit local docs directly. I guess secure file system access is one of the major road blocks, though I’m not sure of the challenges associated with coming up with a standard for this.
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.
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.
Server-side works better, webassembly and fat client on general imo aren’t worth it. It’s benefits require millions of users.
This is the only way;
if (condition) { code }Not
if (condition) { code }Also because of my dyslexia I prefer variable & function names like this; ‘File_Acces’ I find it easier to read than ‘fileAcces’
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.
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.
Internet would be better if javascript was never invented.
The JavaScript ecosystem is made worse by the legions of “developers” in it which amount to bro-velopers that put no thought into if something is needed before they create it. There’s a strong overlap between the idiots in crypto and JavaScript developers that needs to be decoupled drastically.
no thought into if something is needed before they create it
i think the world would be a better place in general if that persists…
Hot take: people who don’t like code reviews have never been part of a good code review culture.
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Make your app use native components instead of making your own crappy theme for the 782th time
Agile in it’s current implementation with excessive meetings wastes more time than the mistakes it tries to avoid.
