I spent a few years growing up with a closet in my bedroom. The closet had an odd design. It looked normal at first, then you walked in to do closet things, and discovered that the wall on your right gave way to an alcove, making for a handy little shelf. Then you looked up, and the wall at the back of the alcove gave way again, into a crawlspace of utter nothingness, where no light could fall and which you immediately identified as the daytime retreat for every ravenous monster you kept at bay with flashlights and stuffed animals each night.
This is what it is to learn programming.
(c) https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Those of you who still find it enjoyable to learn the details of, say, a programming language - being able to happily recite off if NaN equals or does not equal null - you just don't yet understand how utterly fucked the whole thing is.
(с) http://tinyclouds.org/rant.html

It suddenly turned out that these really awkward abstractions that the mathematicians came up with like monads and Kleisli arrows can actually be used in programming, making programming itself rather awkward.
(с) https://www.quora.com/How-useful-is-category-theory-to-programmers

Your professors might understand how the academic job market works (short story: it is ridiculously inefficient in engineering and fubared beyond mortal comprehension in English) but they often have quixotic understandings of how the real world works. For example, they may push you to get extra degrees because a) it sounds like a good idea to them and b) they enjoy having research-producing peons who work for ramen. Remember, market wages for people capable of producing research are $80~100k+++ in your field. That buys an awful lot of ramen.
(c) http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/

JavaScript practices an extremely aggressive type coercion doctrine where comparing apples with bananas always makes sense, especially when they are actually oranges. Everything works somehow. Or not, depending on how you look at it and what time of the day it is. The language also seems to have a deep sensual relationship with strings, trying to convert in and out of them.
(с) https://whydoesitsuck.com/why-does-javanoscript-suck/

Microsoft saw the danger of Javanoscript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javanoscript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.
(c) http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Static typing would be a fine idea if people actually did write programs the way they taught me to in college. But that's not how any of the hackers I know write programs. We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.
(c) http://www.paulgraham.com/hptoc.html

9 times out of 10 in frontend code, abstractions are initially overengineered and unnecessary, even for spa’s. facebook and stackoverflow both started as ugly hacks. pretty much all successful frontend abstractions evolved from a simple product first, which involved alot of corner-cutting to get it shipped. if u try to work it the other way around by building an abstraction first, and then a product on top of it, it will end badly, you will burnout from the complexity, and swear off frontend-coding as not a ‘real’ programming job to make yourself feel better.
(c) https://www.quora.comhttps://www.quora.com/Are-junior-developers-basically-just-a-burden-in-their-first-year comments

Browser notifications. A web platform feature that was useless from the very moment of its inception, annoyed the hell out of everyone, never been used by anyone except maybe by accident, never worked, and now it receives a configuration option to disable it for good. Nice try

Unfortunately, Elm isn’t a library. It’s a language, which just happens to have a great library. Elm qua the language is an unsurmountable pile of poorly-thought-out and impossible-to-compose new ideas on top of the least interesting pieces of Haskell.
(c) http://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/elm-is-wrong

Индустрия протухла. Настоящее программирование и настоящие программисты никуда не делись, но они мало связаны с тем, что сейчас называется карьерой и софтверной индустрией. Весь корпоративный софт - полное говно именно по этой причине. Торвальдс, Столман и др.энтузиасты сумели создать GNU/Linux бесплатно, сидя дома в тапочках и халатах, и на этом софте работает весь интернет. Корпорации сумели создать проприетарное говнецо, которое загружает на ваш комп бинарные блобы с троянами, когда им этого захочется.
(c) https://www.facebook.com/rowilco/posts/10213656738988128

I love Haskell for the same reasons I love Dark Souls. Fantastic and inscrutable lore, a great combat type system, a cliff-wall difficulty curve, and unending punishment.
(c) http://deliberate-software.com/haskell-is-the-dark-souls-of-programming/

A lot of people recommended that I read his blog to gain insight into the IT/software industry. To be honest, it completely repelled me, because I got the impression that (most) engineers are pretentious assholes who try to discourage new people from entering the industry. All his articles can be summarized by this message: "If you weren't born a genius prodigy like US, don't learn programming because you'll never amount to anything and merely hold the rest of us down".
(c) Quora on Jeff Atwood

I think that Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies based on hashing of the block chain should be outlawed. They are a colossal waste of energy and are environmentally destructive.

We can't prevent the drug lords and pedophiles from continuing to use it, but we can block its integration with the real monetary system.

(с) Douglas Crockford -> https://plus.google.com/+DouglasCrockfordEsq/posts/AED9mR3f9ZX

Sometimes designers suck too.

Elm? Really? The experimental language created for Haskell snobs who can’t handle stooping to the level of a regular blue-collar language like Javanoscript? I pictured Elm fans as hipsters standing around talking about how side effects in web applications are so 2008, bro. I definitely did not picture them as people who were shipping applications.
(c) https://blog.realkinetic.com/elm-changed-my-mind-about-unpopular-languages-190a23f4a834

Algorithms are already informing the way doctors treat patients, judges sentence criminals, and banks determine who’s eligible for a loan. AI has the potential to shape those decisions so they’re smarter and fairer for everyone—but only if we can avoid writing racism and sexism into the code, and biasing these systems in a way that will be almost impossible to fix a decade or two from now.

That’s one reason why I’m committed to helping more women and people of color get into tech. I believe we stand a much better chance of getting this technology right—and ensuring it creates a better future for all of us—if we have people of all genders, ethnicities, and backgrounds creating it.
(c) https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/2018-Annual-Letter-questions-from-readers

Though programming was born in mathematics, it has since largely been divorced from it. Most programmers aren’t very fluent in the kind of math—logic and set theory, mostly—that you need to work with TLA+. “Very few programmers—and including very few teachers of programming—understand the very basic concepts and how they’re applied in practice. And they seem to think that all they need is code,” Lamport says. “The idea that there’s some higher level than the code in which you need to be able to think precisely, and that mathematics actually allows you to think precisely about it, is just completely foreign. Because they never learned it.”

Lamport sees this failure to think mathematically about what they’re doing as the problem of modern software development in a nutshell: The stakes keep rising, but programmers aren’t stepping up—they haven’t developed the chops required to handle increasingly complex problems. “In the 15th century,” he said, “people used to build cathedrals without knowing calculus, and nowadays I don’t think you’d allow anyone to build a cathedral without knowing calculus. And I would hope that after some suitably long period of time, people won’t be allowed to write programs if they don’t understand these simple things.”
(c) https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/

Being a programmer who is afraid of pointers seems akin to being a hydrophobic swimmer. (c) quora