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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 19th, 2023
  • wols@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.ml•Got no time to code
    11·
    5 months ago

    Bonus: good tests can also serve as technical documentation.

    Though I have to disagree with the notion that documentation is as important or more so than code.
    Documentation is certainly near the top of the list and often undervalued. I’ve worked on a project where documentation was lacking and it was painful to say the least.
    Without documentation, changing or adding features can be a nightmare. Investigating bugs and offering support is also very difficult. But without code, you have nothing. No product, no users, no value.

    There are (inferior) substitutes for documentation: specialized team knowledge, general technical expertise. These alternative pools of knowledge can be leveraged to create and improve documentation incrementally.
    There’s no replacement for the actual functionality of your applications.

  • wols@lemm.eetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.ml•Javascript can create atomic bombs
    5·
    1 year ago

    Many of the programming languages that are regularly the butt of everyone’s jokes don’t just allow you to use them badly, they make it easy to do so, sometimes easier than using them well.
    This is not a good thing. A good language should

    • be well suited to the task at hand
    • be easy to use correctly
    • be hard to use incorrectly

    The reality is that the average software developer barely knows best practices, much less how to apply them effectively.
    This fact, combined with languages that make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot leads to lots of bad code in the wild.

    Tangentially related rant

    We should attack this problem from both directions: improve developers but also improve languages.
    Sometimes that means replacing them with new languages that are designed on top of years of knowledge that we didn’t have when these old languages were being designed.

    There seems to be a certain cynicism (especially from some more senior developers) about new languages.
    I’ve heard stuff like: every other day a new programming language is invented, it’s all just a fad, they add nothing new, all the existing languages could already do all the things the new ones can, etc.
    To me this misses the point. New languages have the advantage of years of knowledge accrued in the industry along with general technological advancements, allowing them to be safer, more ergonomic, and more efficient.
    Sure, we can also improve existing languages (and should, and do) but often times for one reason or another (backwards compatibility, implementation effort, the wider technological ecosystem, dogma, politics, etc.) old quirks and deficiencies stay.

    Even for experienced developers who know how to use their language of choice well, there can be unnecessary cognitive burden caused by poor language design. The more your language helps you automatically avoid mistakes, the more you can focus on actually developing software.

    We should embrace new languages when they lead to more good code and less bad code.