I find APIs mostly opaque with documentation using tautological descriptions. I wish authors would describe the design at a high level, so I can scaffold my learning.
Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
101–110 of 110 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
#102Having used Scala and TypeScript a lot for work over the last ~5 years, I think I'm going to say static typing. It's lunacy. Computers mostly don't work in types, my brain usually doesn't work in types, and only a small subset of the problems I work on really work in types. The amount of modern languages that think they can solve everything in the type system boggles my mind.
I was going to say the opposite—even my side projects almost immediately hit the point where I’m spending more time fixing bugs that the compiler would have found than I spend time wrestling with static types. I’m building something in Python right now and the lack of static types is just painful. That being said, Scala and typescript have really powerful (maybe too powerful?) type systems.
It all depends what libraries you are using and if they are properly documented and thought through.
I half remember a recent problem in the AWS TypeScript CDK. I don't know what exactly the Type was, but it was like: You get a SomeFoo from (their) API1 and a BarFoo from (their) API2 - they are called nearly the same, they expose basically the same fields, and you are only interested in one of the fields but there are zero convenience functions and you somehow have to convert between these 2 interfaces for no discernable reason and all you want is a `new BarFoo(someFoo.value)` but value is private. That's when you lose all hope because it's functionally identical to just pass `{"value":someFoo.value}` :)
Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
#103Cursor doesn't auto-retry my request, it presents me with a button to click to retry. If you know the request failed, you could just retry on my behalf!
I've not used cursor but if it's one where every request costs token where do you draw the line? 1 retry? 3 retries? Configurable? Bases on what?
I mean, I'm 90% with you but this is at least one where I could imagine a good reason and not just laziness or stupidity on the service's side.
Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
LMAO that's exactly the kind of pattern I'm ranting about. I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not.
I don't mean to a hashmap; I meant to a pojo/dataclass/whatever.
Sure but it's the overly general hashmap based interfaces everywhere which includes these canned serialization formats that's the issue. Someone else in this thread posted noyaml.com which is a great summary of the issue there.
Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so great if you don't know the import or it's not intuitive (pathlib, shutil).
You can search in module names and summaries, $ python Python 3.13.2 (main, Mar 6 2025, 08:26:01) [Clang 15.0.0 (clang-1500.3.9.4)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> help() Welcome to Python 3.13's help utility! If this is your first time using Python, you should definitely check out the tutorial at https://docs.python.org/3.13/tutorial/. Enter the name of any module…
Thanks, I never knew about that modules search.
Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of Python information were you having trouble finding? I do have this problem as well, I've just started a job with Ruby and it took too many searches until I could find the official docs for some kind of syntax. For Python I feel it's easy to find stdlib docs, but can be hard to find some specific things about the language itself in the official docs - sometimes it's too technical and I wish there was a mo…
fucking... all of it the other day, the example that made this top-of-mind, was looking up the python string formatting options. Google found https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html which is a giant wall of text that I should not have to read all of just to find a reference. Plus it has the fucking formal grammar--who cares!? I just want a lookup table. But this is my experience every time I try to do anything.…
Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
#107Cursor doesn't auto-retry my request, it presents me with a button to click to retry. If you know the request failed, you could just retry on my behalf!
I've not used cursor but if it's one where every request costs token where do you draw the line? 1 retry? 3 retries? Configurable? Bases on what? I mean, I'm 90% with you but this is at least one where I could imagine a good reason and not just laziness or stupidity on the service's side.
I imagine (and hope) I'm not being billed for requests that fail.
In my own apps that use Anthropic API, sometimes the req just fails the initial connection (and so has to be retried), usually works in 1-2 retries.
Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
#108I can't believe that in 2025 it is still hard to find documentation for basic functionality in languages as ubiquitous as, say, Python. If I google something simple I get 100 junk sites of garbage (GeeksForGeeks, W3Schools, etc), a bunch of AI-generated crap, a bunch of archaic out-of-date stuff, the official documentation which is a wall of dense text, some tutorials that mention the basics, a bunch of shitty bootca…
claude mcp add context7 -- npx -y @upstash/context7-mcpRe: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
#109I can't believe that in 2025 it is still hard to find documentation for basic functionality in languages as ubiquitous as, say, Python. If I google something simple I get 100 junk sites of garbage (GeeksForGeeks, W3Schools, etc), a bunch of AI-generated crap, a bunch of archaic out-of-date stuff, the official documentation which is a wall of dense text, some tutorials that mention the basics, a bunch of shitty bootca…
claude mcp add context7 -- npx -y @upstash/context7-mcp
unhelpful
Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
#110I can't believe that in 2025 it is still hard to find documentation for basic functionality in languages as ubiquitous as, say, Python. If I google something simple I get 100 junk sites of garbage (GeeksForGeeks, W3Schools, etc), a bunch of AI-generated crap, a bunch of archaic out-of-date stuff, the official documentation which is a wall of dense text, some tutorials that mention the basics, a bunch of shitty bootca…
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