Traps to Developers

I started to say something about C# strings and then I remembered the clusterfuck when it came to Windows development and strings and depending on which API you call, a string is represented by one of a dozen different ways.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/689211/interop-sending-s...

There is no such thing as "just bytes" when it comes to Unicode. UTF-8 is a way to represent Unicode codepoints in binary.

But I agree that author's statement is wrong. Go stings are equivalent to byte slices.

I think there can be a different way to think about CSS that can help with that feeling of never understanding it all. Recently I’ve heard people influential in the CSS world describe it as a “suggestion” to the browser. The browser has its own styles, the user might have some custom stylesheet on top of the browser’s version, extensions, etc etc and at some point CSS is really more a long list of “suggestions” about how the site should look.

If you embrace that idea to the fullest, you can create some interesting designs/patterns that can be more resilient. The “downside” is that this way of writing css will likely made the pixel perfect head of the marketing department hate you unless they also write code.

I think it’s also okay to say that some ways of writing css just aren’t relevant anymore. A good parallel in mind is building construction and general carpentry. These days, a quick 2x4 stud wall or insulated concrete forms is fast, cheap, and standardized around the world. However, many craftspeople still exist that will create beautiful joinery for what is ultimately a simple thing, but we can appreciate that art standalone. With CSS, I don’t suspect we will ever need to go back to floats or crazy background images or whatever but it’s nice that those tools are still there for not only the sake of back compat, but also as a way to tinker and “craft” something bespoke for a special project or just because you like it. Education will eventually catch up and grid and flexbox will keep gaining popularity until we decide that it’s too complicated and come up with some new algorithm. That can all be true though and you can bring value as a developer without knowing every single aspect to the public API.

> A method that returns Optional may return null.

projects that do this drive me bananas

If I had the emotional energy, I'd open a JEP for a new @java.lang.NonNullReference and any type annotated with it would be a compiler error to assign null to it

  public interface Alpha {}
  @java.lang.NonNullReference
  public interface Beta {}

  Alpha a = null; // ok
  Beta b = null; // compiler error

javac will tolerate this

  Beta b;
  if (Random.randBoolean()) {
    b = getBeta();
  } else {
    b = newBeta();
  }

but I would need to squint at the language specification to see if dead code elimination is a nicety or a formality

  Beta b;
  if (true) {
    b = getBeta();
  } else {
    b = null; // I believe this will be elided and thus technically legal
  }

I am unsure how this is supposed to work for CSS. To my knowledge, most CSS properties cannot be substituted for each other. If the subset to be enforced is "CSS properties already present", what is a developer supposed to do if their CSS property is not already present? Change the design?