"It isn't magic!" mantra is often heard in Go apologetics, but every time I see it, it occurs to me that Go's definition of "magic" is somewhat akin to a 15th century peasant seeing a lightbulb. Stuff like exceptions or error types isn't magic - they have been around for a long time, they're well understood, and they have significant advantages.

(c) comments on Goodbye, Clean Code, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22022466

This airplane is designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys.

(c) https://fortune.com/2020/01/10/designed-clowns-supervised-monkeys-internal-boeing-messages-slam-737-max/

I really detest the use of the word "training" in relation to professional activities. Training is what you do to dogs. What you should be doing with people is educating them, not training them. There is a big, big difference.

(c) http://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

I care about this for two reasons.

The first is a principled fuck you. I don’t care whether anything materially bad will or won’t happen as a consequence of Wacom taking this data from me. I simply resent the fact that they’re doing it.

The second is that we can also come up with scenarios that involve real harms.

(c) https://robertheaton.com/2020/02/05/wacom-drawing-tablets-track-name-of-every-application-you-open/

The problem with optimism is that when things do go wrong, not only do you have no idea how to fix it, you don’t even know what went wrong.

(c) https://programmingisterrible.com/post/188942142748/scaling-in-the-presence-of-errorsdont-ignore

...the code may be doggone ugly. One project I worked on actually had a data type called a FuckedString.

(c) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/

In some measure we become what we remember, so we must be careful what we remember

(с) http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

One common pattern is that people think they're getting stuck on esoteric, complex issues. But when you dig down it turns out they're having a hard time with basic notation and terminology. It's difficult to understand quantum mechanics when you're unclear about every third word or piece of notation! Every sentence is a struggle.

It's like they're trying to compose a beautiful sonnet in French, but only know 200 words of French. They're frustrated, and think the trouble is the difficulty of finding a good theme, striking sentiments and images, and so on. But really the issue is that they have only 200 words with which to compose.

My somewhat pious belief was that if people focused more on remembering the basics, and worried less about the “difficult” high-level issues, they'd find the high-level issues took care of themselves.

But while I held this as a strong conviction about other people, I never realized it also applied to me.

(с) http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

Haskell is full of these little decisions where it just won't let you do something because it's not "correct" code, and they kind of don't care if that makes coding in it a fight against the compiler.

Rust took that philosophy and applied it pointers.

(c) YC comments on https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/03/its-not-what-programming-languages-do.html

Boilerplate is not the problem. Magic is the problem.

(c) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22995928 (A Critique of React Hooks)

Мне страшно. Мне хочется забиться в угол и плакать. Я не могу быть уверенным как минимум в половине строк, что я пишу. У меня есть чувство, что я строю фекалодендритные конструкции, а убеждение хотя бы самого себя в том, что написанное имеет смысл, занимает неоправданно много времени. Что бы я ни делал, в моём коде будут UB. Я ни на что не могу повлиять. Психологи говорят, что выученная беспомощность тут где-то рядом, так что написание кода на плюсах для психики не очень полезно.

(с) https://habr.com/ru/post/497114/

Дуглас Крокфорд изобрёл JSON. Некомпетентный болван похоже не знал, что у нас уже есть XML. Программисты задолго до него изобрели способ обмена данными, кем он там себя возомнил вообще?

(с) https://habr.com/en/post/498754/

For the uninitiated, Cascading Style Sheets are a cryptic language developed by the Freemasons to obscure the visual nature of reality and encourage people to depict things using ASCII art.

(c) https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/towashitallaway.pdf

It’s just that Boolean thinking has infected the software world to such an extent that I feel that I have to fight back. Just the idea of comparison to “null” to obtain a Boolean is absurd, even if you think you need a “null” pointer (which you don’t, in a properly designed language).

(c) comments on https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean-blindness/

…we recommend staying away from shell noscripts as much as possible.

(c) https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/shell_noscripting_guide/

Perhaps one of the worst misfeatures of C is the ease with which responsibility for problems can be shifted to the person who wrote the code. “Oh, you segfaulted? I guess you forgot to check for NULL.” If only I had a computer to take care of such tedium for me!

Clearly, computers can’t be expected to do everything for us. But they can be expected to do quite a bit. Programming languages are built for humans, and they ought to eliminate the sorts of rote work humans are bad at whenever possible. A programmer is already busy thinking about the actual problem they want to solve; it’s no surprise that they’ll sometimes forget some tedious detail the language forces them to worry about.

(с) https://eev.ee/blog/2016/12/01/lets-stop-copying-c/

In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer.

(с) The end of the Redis adventure, http://antirez.com/news/133

As I looked for images for the book covers, I came across some odd-looking animal engravings from the 19th century. They seemed to be a good match for all those strange-sounding UNIX terms, and were esoteric enough that I figured they’d probably appeal to programmers.

(c) https://www.oreilly.com/content/a-short-history-of-the-oreilly-animals/

What the heck is this code? What are these method names? set2AsFirstPrime? smallestOddNthMultipleNotLessThanCandidate? Is this meant to be clean code? Is this meant to be a legible, intelligent way to search for prime numbers?

If this is the quality of code which this programmer produces — at his own leisure, under ideal circumstances, with none of the pressures of real production software development, as a teaching example — then why should you pay any attention at all to the rest of his book? Or to his other books?

(c) https://qntm.org/clean

One of the key components of designing a distributed system is deciding when the “distributed” part is actually unnecessarily complex.

(c) Designing Distributed Systems, Brendan Burns, 2018

In my experience Clean Code is a lot like teenage sex. Everybody brags about it, but very few are actually doing it and those that do invariably lead to accidents.

(с) comments on https://qntm.org/clean rant