111–120 of 141 posts
Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris were especially clear/obvious in Perl at the time. Perl was a gazillion times more powerful than Bourne and C-shell (including all the Unix shell tools like `awk`), much more rapid than working in C, incredibly terse (perhaps too much so), and also portable (to all the oddball systems you might have). And the purposes to which Perl was put were often to automate things you'd been doin…
I’ve had a variety of responses to this list over my programming life (~10 years hobby, ~10 years professional). When I first encountered them as a hobbyist, they were surprising, as perhaps intended, due to the framing of classic vices as virtues. On some reflection though, it made sense, and shaped my understanding of programming as somehow _inherently different_ than other types of creation. When I got started wit…
Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris were especially clear/obvious in Perl at the time. Perl was a gazillion times more powerful than Bourne and C-shell (including all the Unix shell tools like `awk`), much more rapid than working in C, incredibly terse (perhaps too much so), and also portable (to all the oddball systems you might have). And the purposes to which Perl was put were often to automate things you'd been doin…
And then, python.
That last one ("hubris") I'm going to call out. Maybe the author means another word, for what he describes, but the actual "hubris" I'm seeing among my colleagues is the belief that lots of people out there don't know how to write code, but that their own $%^& doesn't stink. It's the utter subjectiveness of "best practices" that aren't tied to actual issues of performance, security, or flexibility, or worse - blowing…
I interpreted this "hubris" to mean that I believe I can make a difference, rather than feel that I can't contribute. You can understand why I, personally, would think this is a virtue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then, python.
I love Python, but basically 96% of Python code and developers absolutely suck at everything, I'm fixing a shit python codebase right now. It's like a language which people love to use to write shit code.
That last one ("hubris") I'm going to call out. Maybe the author means another word, for what he describes, but the actual "hubris" I'm seeing among my colleagues is the belief that lots of people out there don't know how to write code, but that their own $%^& doesn't stink. It's the utter subjectiveness of "best practices" that aren't tied to actual issues of performance, security, or flexibility, or worse - blowing…
Having pride means that I want to write code that others view as good code and won't look at in the future as a mad hatter's ramblings.
Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris were especially clear/obvious in Perl at the time. Perl was a gazillion times more powerful than Bourne and C-shell (including all the Unix shell tools like `awk`), much more rapid than working in C, incredibly terse (perhaps too much so), and also portable (to all the oddball systems you might have). And the purposes to which Perl was put were often to automate things you'd been doin…
I used to like Perl, but I found it hard work at times not to create something that, without ample commenting which arguably removes a lot of the benefit of terseness, even I wouldn't understand without some thought when looking at it a few months down the line.
Perl was (is? - I assume it is still used a fair bit) often referred to as a write-only programming language for this reason.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I especially love it when these people turn code which can be debugged (breakpoints can be set and hit) into one-liners for no reason which you have to rewrite in order to even set breakpoints. Well done, I hope you’re proud.
you can't debug within a line?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then, python.
I love Python, but basically 96% of Python code and developers absolutely suck at everything, I'm fixing a shit python codebase right now. It's like a language which people love to use to write shit code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then, python.
I love Python, but basically 96% of Python code and developers absolutely suck at everything, I'm fixing a shit python codebase right now. It's like a language which people love to use to write shit code.