301–310 of 416 posts
On a similar note but more theoretical, my life changed when I learned about design patterns. Martin Fowler's books/site are a good place to start [2].
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In 2019 Makefiles are a useful tool for automating project-level things. Too often webapps will require you to install X to install Y to run producing artifact Z. Since Make is old and baked and everywhere, specifying "make Z" is a useful project-level development process. It's not tied to a language (e.g. Tox) nor a huge runtime (Docker). Make is small enough in scope to be easy, and large enough to be capable witho…
> The big downside of Make, alas, is Windows compatibility. GNU Make works fine on Windows. The sources come with a vcproj to build it natively, or you get it from ezwinports. At my dayjob, we have a pretty complicated build with GNU Make for cross-compiling our application to Arm and PowerPC, and it works on Windows, even with special Guile scripts to reduce the number of shell calls which are extremely slow on Wind…
>ezwinports
Interesting, hadn't run into this before. What's the advantage over MSYS2?
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In 2019 Makefiles are a useful tool for automating project-level things. Too often webapps will require you to install X to install Y to run producing artifact Z. Since Make is old and baked and everywhere, specifying "make Z" is a useful project-level development process. It's not tied to a language (e.g. Tox) nor a huge runtime (Docker). Make is small enough in scope to be easy, and large enough to be capable witho…
> The big downside of Make, alas, is Windows compatibility. You'd have to give me a _very_ compelling reason to support developers who use Windows, when Windows lacks these essential tools. Besides, don't people who develop on Windows live in WSL?
VS2019 supports Clang and cmake now.
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If you write your own Makefiles you know what they do. They’re not that hard to grok and even hand-rolled Makefile use is (IMO) underrated.
I always had trouble reading makefiles because the control flow is not very linear. At least with shell files basically everything is explicit.
Unit testing, mocking, and various other testing techniques. Why? Any project of sufficient complexity is very hard to test. If all you're doing is code -> build -> run to debug your code, you can very easily break something that's not in your immediate attention. The problem is that good unit testing is hard, and time consuming. It can be so time consuming, that unless you can really plan in advance how you test, yo…
Let me second this. And in particular, I strongly encourage every developer to try starting a new project in a test-driven fashion (by which I mean that you advance the code by writing a bit of test and making it pass, and then doing that over and over.) There's a qualitative difference between working in a well-tested code base that's very hard to describe convincingly. A lot of my early development experience was i…
And TDD seems to create so many tests that you get huge false positive rates. I recently jumped on a project and I made a couple of fairly small code changes (a couple of hours) which caused 100 tests to fail. I then spent the next two days going through and correcting all 100 tests none of which found an issue in my code.
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Do you know about curl/wget? Each one does pretty much the same thing as the other, but you can start a religious war by suggesting that one is preferable. Anyway, either of them will let you mirror a website so you never have to worry about it going down.
And, since every Unix command line tool inevitably gets mined and turned into a web service, you could always submit those urls to archive.org instead of or as well as curl-ing/wget-ing them.
Makefiles. I always dismissed them as a C compiler thing. Something that could never be useful for Python programming. But nowadays every project I create has a Makefile to bind together all task involved on that project. From bootstrapping the dev environment, running checks/test, starting a devserver, building releases and container images. Makefiles are just such a nice place to put scripts for these common tasks…
I hate makefiles. That said, I wholeheartedly agree with the comment. It's sad that something so central to a project and so useful and important to so many people seems like it hasn't advanced ... ever. Developers generally do the minimum with Makefiles and get out. They are similar to 1040 forms in popularity. I've always had a dream of a redesigned "make" system... with import statements, object oriented rules, cl…
* Regular expressions. The most valuable "not a language" that I know. * SQL. For me, it was a trip coming from a procedural language background. I kept trying to figure out how to do loops. * Command line - DOS and unix * Batch languages for those. * HTML / CSS / Java (please don't kill me) Script and the DOM
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> The big downside of Make, alas, is Windows compatibility. GNU Make works fine on Windows. The sources come with a vcproj to build it natively, or you get it from ezwinports. At my dayjob, we have a pretty complicated build with GNU Make for cross-compiling our application to Arm and PowerPC, and it works on Windows, even with special Guile scripts to reduce the number of shell calls which are extremely slow on Wind…
You'll have WSL/WSL2 to work with, too. If not make, then CMake is now supported in Visual Studio (2017/2019) and works well. >ezwinports Interesting, hadn't run into this before. What's the advantage over MSYS2?
Makefiles. I always dismissed them as a C compiler thing. Something that could never be useful for Python programming. But nowadays every project I create has a Makefile to bind together all task involved on that project. From bootstrapping the dev environment, running checks/test, starting a devserver, building releases and container images. Makefiles are just such a nice place to put scripts for these common tasks…
Have you ever considered using Rakefiles instead? https://github.com/ruby/rake