Principal Engineer for Accumulate
Copilot frequently produces results that need to be fixed. Compilers don’t do that. Anyone who uses copilot to generate code without understanding how that code works is a shit developer. The same is true of anyone who copies from stack overflow/etc without understanding what they’re copying.
Using git reset --keep would just make more work since I’ll have to throw away uncommitted changes anyways. Removing uncommitted changes is kind of the whole point, it is called ‘reset’ after all. If I want to preserve uncommitted changes, I’ll either stash them or commit them to a temporary branch. That has the added benefit of adding those changes to the reflog so if I screw up later I’ll be able to recover them.
If you’re using reset with uncommitted changes and you’re not intentionally throwing them away, you’re doing something wrong. git reset —hard means “fuck everything, set the state to X”. I only ever use it when I want to throw away the current state.
It’s not clear to me that AMD is in breach of contract, though I admit I haven’t looked into it in detail. But regardless, the contract is irrelevant to the open source thing unless that was in the terms of the contract.
If I steal code and release it with an open source license, that license is not valid. The author released his work open source based on an email from AMD. AMD is now saying that email was not legally binding thus the author did not have the right to release it under and open source license thus that license was not legally valid. If you had forked it and continued to use it, AMD could take you to court and say that the license you are operating under is legally invalid.
async/await infecting all of my code, being unable to create a get myField() method that involves a hash calculation. It may be standard to do heavy lifting concurrently, but async hash functions are certainly not standard in any of the languages I’ve used (which is quite a few).
Ananace and the article they linked are using their dislike of Go to conclude that it’s a bad language*. It is not a bad language. Every language has hidden complexity and foot guns. They don’t like Go. Maybe you won’t like Go. That’s ok. But that doesn’t make Go a bad language. The language designers are very opinionated and you might dislike them and their decisions.
I haven’t used Rust but from what I’ve seen, it’s a lot less readable than Go. And the only thing more important than readability is whether or not the code does what it’s supposed to do. For that reason I doubt I’ll ever use Rust outside of specific circumstances.
*I’m using “a bad language” as shorthand for “a language you shouldn’t use”. Maybe they don’t think it’s bad but amounts to the same thing.
Better to not have version control!? Dear god I hope I never work on anything with you.
“Flagged as spam”, “Publication Not Available”. I can’t see the article.
True, but if you read the article the point is clearly not about source code vs non-source configuration. There’s an implicit assumption that source code is something the developer will be modifying as time goes on, but the real point is, “Don’t make users merge changes.”
Programming languages are tools. I couldn’t care less about learning a new tool just for the sake of learning. My interest in learning tools is exclusively practical - if they help me do my work better.
I find functional languages interesting, but that’s because I find the underlying theory interesting and worth learning for its own sake, not because I actually care about the specific language it’s written in. Even then these days I’d rather learn about woodworking (which is currently my main hobby) than a programming paradigm I’m probably never going to use.
I think the author’s primary point is, “Merging changes sucks, don’t make your users do that,” with a corollary: if your program loads configuration from a directory that is only populated by the user, there’s nothing to merge and thus never any merge conflicts. Case in point: /etc/polkit-1/rules.d. I can add whatever rules files I want in there and they’re never going to conflict when I update. If PolKit makes breaking changes to the format, it will log errors somewhere and I can look at those errors, look at my rules, and figure out how to fix them. That’s a hell of a lot easier than merging conflicting changes to code/configuration.
Additionally, switch performs extra sanity checks that checkout doesn’t, for example switch would abort operation if it would lead to loss of local changes.
What checks? Under what situation does checkout lead to loss of changes? If I make changes and attempt to checkout a ref that would overwrite them, I get the following error:
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout:
some/file
Please commit your changes or stash them before you switch branches.
Aborting
To my knowledge it’s not possible to overwrite changes when switching branches/refs (git checkout <ref> without any other arguments or flags) so I guess what the author really means is, “If you use checkout incorrectly you can overwrite local changes.” As far as I can recall I’ve never accidentally git checkout <ref> <some/file> so I don’t see a reason to retrain my muscle memory. I do use git restore since it’s behavior is a lot more obvious than checkout/reset though sometimes I still use git checkout <ref> -- <some/file> because muscle memory.
Also setting up a worktree is really easy. git worktree add ../hotfix prod-branch && cd ../hotfix and get working. Though in reality it’s cd ../hotfix && git checkout prod-branch because I’ve never needed more than one secondary worktree.
The presence of semicolons is not a language killer.
I’m not saying it is. But every time I have to work in a language that requires semicolons I’m constantly forgetting them and constantly reminded of how nice it is to not have to care in Go.
After programming in Go for nearly a decade, the idea of going back to needing semicolons brings me pain. Rust seems cool, but semicolons 🤢
I’d rather spend my free time doing something I enjoy
Why? I see no reason to go through the hassle of learning yet another language when Go serves my purposes perfectly and I’m happy with it.
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The key difference is that compilers don’t fuck up, outside of the very rare compiler bug. LLMs do fuck up, quite often.