Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?

"elseif", cannot stand that statement. Only know 1 other who hates it :)

I don't mean to a hashmap; I meant to a pojo/dataclass/whatever.

i tried to submit a patch to retroarch and it was one of the least pleasant experiences i've had in a while. makefile hell, layers and layers of incomprehensible macros, and spaghetti code everywhere. no thank you. i may be a masochist but i still respect my time.

Most documentation sucks - Example: I like Free Pascal/Lazarus, it has much to recommend it, except the documentation sucks, it's an anti-feature. Many functions are documented with a list of arguments, and that's about it... not what those arguments should be, nor examples of usage, etc. The same is true for many languages and libraries. It's part of the reason LLM coding engines enhance productivity (by helping you get around this defect)

Null terminated strings - Really... it's 2025... can't we kill that off already?

Breaking changes to languages/libraries -- Python really caused a ton of unnecessary grief with the breaking changes to strings in their rush to force Unicode into places it didn't belong.

Ambient Authority Operating Systems - Why do I have to trust all of my programs with all of my user privileges? I don't do that in other areas of life... I don't hand over my wallet to buy an ice cream cone. I don't wire everything directly into the 220 feed into my house. Why can't we just use an OS that supports power boxes (dialog boxes for file operations, that enforce the choice, instead of leaving it up to good faith in the application)

Internet "Access" instead of full connectivity - Why are we still forced to "access" the internet, instead of just running our own machines? (If we had better OSs, we could do that safely).

Memex - It's been 80 years... a full human lifespan... and we still don't have a working Memex. We should be able to surf the net, and then recall (offline!) and recreate anything we've seen, link it into our own narratives, and then spool off a copy for our friends.

HTML - HTML is not a language for the markup (annotation) of hypertext. You can't add a separate new layer to an existing resource without copying or editing it. HTML is part of why we still don't have Memex. (That and copyright insanity)

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, keyword, or topic to get help on writing
    Python programs and using Python modules.  To get a list of available
    modules, keywords, symbols, or topics, enter "modules", "keywords",
    "symbols", or "topics".
    
    Each module also comes with a one-line summary of what it does; to list
    the modules whose name or summary contain a given string such as "spam",
    enter "modules spam".
    
    To quit this help utility and return to the interpreter,
    enter "q", "quit" or "exit".
    
    help> modules files
    
    Here is a list of modules whose name or summary contains 'files'.
    If there are any, enter a module name to get more help.
    
    compileall - Module/script to byte-compile all .py files to .pyc files.
    filecmp - Utilities for comparing files and directories.
    fileinput - Helper class to quickly write a loop over all standard input files.
    gzip - Functions that read and write gzipped files.
    idlelib.grep - Grep dialog for Find in Files functionality.
    linecache - Cache lines from Python source files.
    netrc - An object-oriented interface to .netrc files.
    pathlib - Object-oriented filesystem paths.
    plistlib - plistlib.py -- a tool to generate and parse MacOSX .plist files.
    shutil - Utility functions for copying and archiving files and directory trees.
    tempfile - Temporary files.
    ...

I know there's search engines and there's use cases. I'm just trying to highlight that some people that work in a language day in and out, don't even know how to get their documentation. I just want people to know their tools better to ask smarter questions. It won't remove questions and that's fine. Just help me help you.