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Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

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

#71

Post by mejutoco »

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.

Not trying to convince you, although I disagree completely. I only want to share how I think about it in case it resonates. I am over simplifying but bear with me.

It is impossible how to know if a program will halt without running it, in general terms (Halting problem).

One way to think about the type system is as a less expressive language that is guaranteed to halt. So, it has the pro that we can check properties of the system without running it (IMHO, that is amazing), but it also has the con that it is less expressive (I know, or think I know sometimes, some property holds but you need to express it using the the system) which can be frustrating.

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

#72

Post by itake »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #35

I’m pretty sick of the moving target that is Node and common build chains. Stuff I wrote in Javascript/jQuery twenty years ago still works fine in the browser. Now I’ve got some Gatsby projects I built around 2019 and I can't deploy them due to various degrees of incompatibility with minimum versions of Node. I get why, as a server platform, Node has to be improved to eliminate security holes. But for static site dep…

Yeah, I went through that too: Gatsby, React, and NodeJS all needed upgrading.

And if a package locks the version of node, you have to deal with removing the package or patching it yourself.

ChatGPT has saved me soo many hours fixing this though.

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

#73

Post by yieldcrv »

impure wrote: post #63
yieldcrv wrote: post #18

monorepos complicate everything. documentation doesn't factor them in, deployment instructions don't factor them in. efficient deployment needs a whole additional framework on top. additionally AI also doesn't understand the combination of things, but when it does, a new major version of a framework has dropped and isn't in the training set. I'm just venting because that's the prompt and I don't need a solution or re…

Just use Git Submodules.

Honestly, maybe.

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

#74

Post by juancn »

Having to put contact information to get any technical info on a commercial product.

It tells me within 5 minutes that dealing with you is going to be a pain in the ass, so I'm unlikely to buy or pursue and I'll start looking for something else.

I don't want to be put in a sales funnel, not yet, I just want to be able to do some due diligence on my own for a little while.

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

#76

Post by ajkjk »

layman51 wrote: post #39
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…

I understand why GeeksForGeeks is garbage but I don’t get why W3Schools is garbage. Anyone know why?

are you asking why it is bad as in "in what sense is it bad?" or as in "how did it end up being so bad"?

It's bad because it's missing most of the information it should have. look at https://www.w3schools.com/css/css3_flexbox.asp for instance, it has none of the reference materials it should have about flex, yet it is in the top 5 google results for "css flex". it's completely useless as a reference (or for learning, really). compare to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme... which actually has the information on it, albeit in an annoying tutorial format.

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

#77

Post by ajkjk »

goodoldneon wrote: post #5
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…

PEPs are often great documentation. They definitely don't cover everything, but they can be helpful

how sad it is that the documents that described the changes exist as the reference for them, though.

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

#78

Post by ajkjk »

edudobay wrote: post #20
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…

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. I always end up going back to https://learnxinyminutes.com/python/ because at least it just lists all the information I want! Of course if I programmed Python every day, which I haven't in a while, then a lot of this would be preloaded in my mind... but seriously, just make a damn reference, it's not hard. Python seems to constantly conflate "full technical specification" with "quick reference materials". Which, fine, if time and energy were no limitations, would be equivalent. But sometimes you just want to know the answer to a simple question in less than 30 minutes.

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

#79

Post by belter »

ranger_danger wrote: post #64
belter wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that LLMs can be trained on it? I predict the return of the paid web just on the back of that.

what do you suggest?

Fix the copyright laws against AI, or I suggest creators go full Atlas Shrugged...

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

#80

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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?"

But what does this have to do with programming

Is this suggesting that operating a computer via a shell is "programming"

(It's possible to administer a computer running UNIX by using a shell, without knowing any programming languages^1)

"dear god, can i just get a terminal that runs soemthing like Python directly?"

Assuming "dear god" is a figure of speech, who would be the person(s) responsible for delivering on this request

Many years ago, during experimentation, I changed the program launched by init to a program other than a Bourne shell by editing one line of init.c

That "shells still exist in more-or-less the same form" is probably one of the reasons I like them so much

1. Assuming one believes the shell is not a programming language

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