• 12 Posts
  • 630 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • I mean, if we’re talking about all those problems, the no-type-annotations issue is rather specific for Python, JS/TS and Ruby.

    But in general, I feel like there’s somewhat of an old world vs. new world divide, which happened when package registries started accepting libraries from everyone and their cat.

    In C, for example, most libraries you’ll use will be quite well-documented, but you’ll also never hear of the library that Greg’s cat started writing for the niche thing that you’re trying to do.

    Unfortunately, Greg’s cat got distracted by a ball of yarn rolling by and then that was more fun than writing documentation.
    That’s the tradeoff, you get access to more libraries, but you just can’t expect all of them to be extremely high-quality…



  • Honestly also annoying as a not-so-new folk. I just thought about this yesterday, I reasonably expect to clone a random project from the internet written Java, Rust et al, and to be able to open it in my IDE and look at it.

    Meanwhile, a Python project from two years ago that I helped to build, I do not expect to be able to reasonably view in an IDE at all. I remember, we gave up trying to fix all the supposedly missing dependencies at some point…



  • I don’t know, man, far too many people seem to think that “easy to learn” means they’ll know all they need to know in relatively short time.

    Like, you talk to our data scientists and they’ll tell you doing anything in Python, no problem. But you talk to our seasoned software engineers and you see the war flashbacks in their eyes, because it racks up in complexity so fucking quickly, it’s insane.






  • I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Them announcing something like this looks good PR-wise, so they’ll do it, even if they don’t actually expect this effort to lead to anything.

    But even if they do implement such an API, companies won’t start adopting this API until its capabilities are roughly comparable to the kernel-level solution AND it’s available on most Windows systems in the wild. So, we’re likely talking more than a decade before this sees sufficient adoption…


  • The guy keeps on picking on Go, which is infamous for having terrible error handling, and then he has the nerve to even pick on the UNIX process return convention, which was designed in the 70s.
    The few times he mentions Rust, for whatever reason he keeps on assuming that .unwrap() is the only choice, which’s use is decidedly discouraged in production code.

    I do think there is room for debate here. But error handling is a hellishly complex topic, with different needs between among others:

    • short- vs. long-running processes
    • API vs. user-facing
    • small vs. big codebase
    • library vs. application code
    • prototyping vs. production phase

    And even if you pick out a specific field, the two concepts are not clearly separated.
    Error values in Rust usually have backtraces these days, for example (unless you’re doing embedded where this isn’t possible).
    Or Java makes you list exceptions in your function signature (except for unchecked exceptions), so you actually can’t just start throwing new exceptions in your little corner without the rest of the codebase knowing.
    I find it quite difficult to properly define the differences between the two.







  • As many here have commented, the map is pretty bad and lots of these are not officially recognized as national flowers.

    Having said that, actual national flowers, much like national animals, are often just whatever commonly grows in the country (assuming there is one flower that really sticks out).
    They don’t have to be unique, because you’ll have a flag or a coat of arms for that purpose (which may portray that flower or animal, for what it’s worth). So, they’re rather just part of the “national branding”, if you will.