I will never understand why people with power are this petty.

They probably think it’s a huge flex, but it makes them look like the most pants-shittingly immature little cry babies.

Real power is not devoting brain cycles to things that should be beneath you.

At my last job we had a lot of old code, and our supposedly smartest framework people couldn’t be bothered learning front end properly. So there was a mix of methods for passing values to the front end, but nobody seemed to think of just passing JSON and parsing it into a single source of truth. There was so much digging for data in hidden columns of nested HTML tables, and you never knew if booleans would be “true”, “TRUE”, “1”, or “Y” strings.

Never mind having to unformat currency strings to check the value then format them back to strings after updating values.

I fixed this stuff when I could, but it was half baked into the custom framework.

PLACEHOLDER_TOKEN

I thought the same, until I spent a few years on a codebase where self-documenting code was enforced with detailed code reviews. That does a very good job of clearing up the ambiguity.

If you can’t get that kind of review, then by all means use comments.

I’m still waiting for the day I see UML in a professional context. My undergrad teachers were all about it.

Similarly, I don’t design software using design patterns, and I’ve had to discourage juniors from forcing them into projects where they don’t add any value. But that’s not to say design patterns aren’t useful. They do exactly what you say, allowing your brain to recognise a pattern so you can remember or communicate it without having to go into details. Most of the time it won’t be an exact fit for the ideal pattern implementation, but it’s still easier to remember the variation.

I wish they were taught more as communication and cognitive tools than silver bullets for good software design.

In the real world there aren’t even that many patterns. On a very large project you’re likely to see the same patterns repeated throughout the system, because a good architecture doesn’t add variation and complexity unless there’s a lot of value to gain. You learn the default way, and then the diffs.

The trick is for those other AIs to reserve a few bucks, so they can repeat the process but this time cash out early. Keep repeating until everybody wins.

Just ask the AI how to turn $1 into $100M with high frequency trading!

Unit test dummy data is full of it. Need an arbitrary date? Pick a special birthday. Location? Wherever you first met.

Not the most public dedication, but perhaps more impactful than yet another song about the one that got away.

Programming typefaces with ligatures are a step in this direction.

I would try this in something like Haskell, where some of the more exotic character sequences get tricky to recognise.

Unison might be the best language to test this in. Having identifiers separate from the actual definitions, you can call anything whatever you want.

It’s like how when you were a kid, you thought quicksand was something you would need to be aware of as an adult in the big wide world. In my undergrad, mod everywhere. Very important knowledge. Now not so much.

It’s unfortunate timing. I’m going to give it an overdue glowing review. And hint that a lemmy conversion would be well received.

I got an app update just yesterday that cleaned up visuals a bit. Either they are sticking it out, or wanted to push some stuff out of the pipeline to finish on a high.