Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

#41

Post by arduinomancer » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

panic wrote: post #19

It’s frustrating to have to find the right place to report a bug, learn the specific format the project is expecting, then have the bug closed by a “stale bot” after a few weeks. I wish there were an independent, cross-product bug tracker that focused on cataloguing and diagnosing bugs for the benefit of users rather than on tracking work for the benefit of the developer.

That is an interesting idea, like a universal bug tracker

If you could report a bug on any product/project and it’s up to the users to open/verify/close it

Could put pressure on companies to improve quality since the number of bugs is public

Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

#42

Post by SaberTail » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 4:58 PM UTC

Currently, domain specific languages written in YAML. I see these everywhere, from configuring individual utilities to managing giant architectural stacks. People get in their heads that YAML is more easily written and read than code, and so instead of just writing the code to do something, users have to deal with a bunch of YAML.

The drawbacks of YAML have been well-documented[1]. And I think it's worse now in the LLM era. If I have a system that's controlled via scripts, an LLM is going to be good at modifying those scripts. Some random YAML DSL? The LLMs have seen far fewer examples, and so they're going to have a harder time writing and modifying things. There's also good tooling for linting and checking and testing scripts to ensure LLM output is correct. The tooling for YAML itself is more limited, even before getting into whatever application-specific esoteric things the dev threw in.

[1] https://noyaml.com/

Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

#43

Post by catlover76 » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

msgodel wrote: post #21

Hash maps. Everyone just turns their brains off and uses hash maps for everything. The code this creates is awful for users, awful for people consuming it, awful for people maintaining it. Think for five minutes about your abstraction and create meaningful types and config languages, don't just hack it with a hashmap.

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

#44

Post by giraffe_lady » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

J_McQuade wrote: post #36

Having 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've come to believe through experience that hindley milner and its derivatives are the sweet spot. I shouldn't have to tell the compiler the types, and I shouldn't be attempting to implement business solutions in the type system. It should just know what is already there and tell me it when it can't reconcile that with what I'm adding, because that indicates a problem with my reasoning. The constraints this places on the language semantics end up being neutral-to-positive as well.

Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

#45

Post by fhd2 » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

Other people's AI generated code. They don't understand it, it's over engineered, it looks right at first glance but turns out to be full of subtle bugs. At least that's pretty much universally been my experience.

What could be done about it? Hard to tell. I think actually productive use cases of generative AI for software development exist, I spend a lot of time with Claude every day. But I don't generate code, examples maybe, mostly I use it as a first (but not only) tool for research.

I think a lot of tooling could be built around generative AI providing reviews for human code, rather than it generating code for humans to review.

I'm pretty confident we'll get to a good place with a set of good practices and good tooling. But right now, it's pretty terrible, and my only solution at the moment is to not work with anyone who AI generates code. Luckily I'm in a position to enforce that, not everybody is.

Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

#46

Post by torial » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

Git. Having lived through many cycles of version control systems (VSS, SVN, TFS, Hg), this one has gone on long enough to be replaced with something more intuitive. I think a lot of project complexity is work arounds of inherent Git issues. But I'm just a caveman lawyer.

Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

#47

Post by jolmg » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 5:00 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #3

I 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…

> also it is amazing to me that shells still exist in more-or-less the same form. dear god can I just get a terminal that runs something like Python directly?

There's no reason why you can't set Python to be your shell. Here you go:

  sudo usermod -s /usr/bin/python $USER
  su $USER

You'll likely find that it's not that great as a shell language. Shell languages are made to be primarily used interactively. With Python, you'll have a lot of extra syntax to type all the time. They're also made to glue other programs together. I don't think you'll find it as convenient to use the output of one program as the input of another in Python. Job control will also not be as convenient.

Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

#48

Post by ieie3366 » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

Using JS instead of TS. Pre-LLMs it was way slower to write and debug complex types. Especially in startup environments it was not often worth it.

Nowadays in 2025 with LLM autocomplete in IDEs, TS is a joy, anyone not using it for anything serious just smells of plain incompetence

Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

#49

Post by colechristensen » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

hackyhacky wrote: post #7

The fact that most new programming services and products are oriented towards C-suite types, and not to the people who actually use them. Most websites looks like [1] or [2] which are full of corporate-friendly buzzwords but don't help me understand what they actually do or how they work. To get a concrete understanding I need to go to github and find repos that actually use the product to even understand what it's f…

Que Office Space: "What would you say... ya do here?"

Not just programming languages, all sorts of tech product websites really fail to answer the two essential questions "What the heck do you do and what does it cost?" while having lots of fancy words and pictures.

Even Cloudflare. Imagine you're one of the 10,000 people to discover what Cloudflare does today[1]. Can you go to their website and get an answer? Absolutely not. "We make websites, apps, and networks faster and more secure. Our developer platform is the best place to build modern apps and deliver AI initiatives." above the fold on their front page. If you don't already know what Cloudflare does, does this mean anything at all? Not in the slightest.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

#50

Post by giraffe_lady » Thu, Jul 17, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

torial wrote: post #46

Git. Having lived through many cycles of version control systems (VSS, SVN, TFS, Hg), this one has gone on long enough to be replaced with something more intuitive. I think a lot of project complexity is work arounds of inherent Git issues. But I'm just a caveman lawyer.

I switched to fossil for personal projects a few years ago. Documentation and ticket system already there, hosts itself so don't need to bother with github etc. Different collaboration model but so far has worked fine when I've needed to bring other people in.