Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43678232

by polygot • 1 year ago

17 49 1 year ago

news.ycombinator.com

orionblastar• 1 year ago

Trying to debug and find pointer and memory leak problems.

k310• 1 year ago

Interpret everything. Perl, Tcl, irb, groovy on the desktop.

On the iphone, only BASIC. :-)

"Just Run, Baby."

almosthere• 1 year ago

The internet and software has destroyed humanity.

ant1oz• 1 year ago

I would say that working as a programmer in a corporate environment is a bit similar to being paid to be a novel writer by people who don't know how to read, but absolutely want to tell you how to do your job properly.

mraza007• 1 year ago

This is true, Being in corporate kills your creativity

terminalbraid• 1 year ago

Is this an unpopular opinion?

bwbtwbewrtb• 1 year ago

vast vast majority of code written is what should have been compiler output

dandelion94• 1 year ago

- 90% of abstraction is dreadful. That means _your_ particular abstraction is almost certainly bad, and we don't want to learn it.

- There is a lack of respect for the history of programming. IMO it has caused the industry to be stuck in a perpetual cycle of half-baked rediscovery.

- Similarly, a type of "FAANG-syndrome" exists and allows sub-par ideas to take over mind share of the industry. Once a technology picks up enough momentum, it will snowball and we're stuck working with legacy trash almost immediately. Developers legitimately seem to believe each trend is good.

- Our industry's shared vocabulary is too weakly defined. Phrases like "The right tool for the job" are ubiquitous but essentially meaningless and used as a form of shorthand "I currently feel this is correct". If we had a real professional lexicon, the first thing juniors would learn would be to enumerate reasoning to a precise degree. IME most "senior" devs can barely do it.

dandelion94• 1 year ago

- Dynamic languages are good, actually. IDE auto-completion and full-project renaming are the features that hit above their weight when using static type systems. IMO the remaining benefits of static types are within the same order of usefulness as the pros and cons of dynamic langs; You can argue about them on a case by case basis. This means static types aren't inherently better than dynamic languages (which is the popular opinion of the day), there's just a tooling issue right now. Therefore, dynamic langs will eventually make a comeback in popularity.

solardev12• 1 year ago

How do you enforce input and output compatibility across modular functions and projects without strong types? Is there a better standard way to specify the accepted input shape and expected output options?

Ekaros• 1 year ago

Web was a mistake...

solardev12• 1 year ago

Found the Gopher holdout

arduinomancer3• 1 year ago

This is surprisingly popular among programmers

yen2232• 1 year ago

If you consider the constraints on how it can evolve and the alternatives that has been attempted, I think web languages turned out pretty well.

solardev12• 1 year ago

I wouldn't say they're "good", but it's cool that they've managed to stay somewhat open at all.

In an alternate timeline, Microsoft might've won out with single vendor .NET everywhere. The DX would be better but everything would be way more closed.

yen2232• 1 year ago

I think openness is a must. Alternatives that were proprietary largely died out because they were proprietary. They can't survive transitions into newer platforms, like how Flash failed to make it into mobile

dysoco• 1 year ago

To be fair if they had a monopoly perhaps they would have little incentive to make DX better in order to compete.

austin-cheney4• 1 year ago

* State management is one of the most simple problems to solve in any application.

* WebSockets are superior to all revisions of HTTP except that HTTP is sessionless. Typically when developers argue against WebSockets it’s because they cannot program.

* Your software isn’t fast. Not ever, unless you have numbers for comparison.

* Things like jquery, React, Spring, Rails, and so forth do not exist to create superior software. They exist to help businesses hire unqualified developers.

* If you want to be a 10x developer just don’t repeat the mistakes other people commonly repeat. Programming mastery is not required and follows from your 10x solutions.

* I find it dreadfully hypocritical that people complain about AI in the interview process and simultaneously dismiss the idea of requiring licensing for professional software practice.

solardev12• 1 year ago

WebSockets are superior to all revisions of HTTP except that HTTP is sessionless. Typically when developers argue against WebSockets it’s because they cannot program.

What did you mean by this? Were you suggesting that interactive web apps should maintain a persistent and stateful connection to the server and use that to send interaction events and receive the outputs back, like a video game would, rather than using stateless HTTP calls and cookies and such? Why is that superior?

And sorry if I misunderstood!

austin-cheney4• 1 year ago

Were you suggesting that interactive web apps should maintain a persistent and stateful connection to the server and use that to send interaction events and receive the outputs back, like a video game would

That is how I design all my web facing applications now. The idea is that with WebSockets all messaging is fire and forget and that is independently true from both sides of the wire. That means everything is event oriented on each side separately and nothing waits on round trips, polling, or other complexity. In my largest application when I converted everything from HTTP to WebSocket messaging I gained an instant 8x performance boost and dramatically lower the architectural complexity of the application.

dandelion94• 1 year ago

WebSockets are often blocked by corporate firewalls/proxies, I don't think it's as simple as saying WebSocket > HTTP

austin-cheney4• 1 year ago

To solve for that you can serve WebSockets on the same port as HTTP. Most web server application's don't know how to configure that, but I know it can be done because I doing it right now in my own applications.

thiht• 1 year ago

Our job is programming. I regularly see opinions that "90% of our job is not programming" and I don’t relate. Sure, our job is not just programming, but honestly if you don’t spend at least 50% of your work time programming, there’s something seriously wrong in your organization.

Someone12342• 1 year ago

What is "our" job in this context? For example, when I was a junior over 50% of my work was literal programming, but as I get more senior I program less and less.

From my perspective "our" job is to deliver solutions to specific problems our end-users have. How people accomplish that varies a lot by their position/seniority.

To get into the weeds: When I first stared worst case scenario, I could waste my own time with poor or overengineered solutions. Now I can waste half a dozen programmer's time by not doing enough due-diligence and or planning.

solardev12• 1 year ago

It really depends on your role. I still think our job is ultimately to solve problems for users and/or other stakeholders, and that coding is just one of the tools we use.

But it's not always the best tool. Even as an IC, I've done far more with emails and meetings than just writing code without thinking, whether that's discussing UX implementation details with the designer or pushing back on some half-baked over-engineered solution from management or fighting some evil advertising and tracking scheme from marketing. We don't just write code but also gatekeep it with some level of professional judgment and ethical discretion. (Or at least should.)

I think the orgs that don't give you any autonomy or agency beyond "code monkey" are the more problematic ones. Not only will you burn out having to repeatedly implement things you have no input into, you'll also be the easiest to replace if all you do is code.

dalmo32• 1 year ago

ultimately to solve problems for users and/or other stakeholders

Doesn't this describe every job on Earth?

arduinomancer3• 1 year ago

Not everyone is cranking out boilerplate web services/web apps

Someone12342• 1 year ago

The more tools between raw code and a running solution, the more fragile it is.

This issue is particularly prevalent in the Javascript world, where it isn't uncommon that when you hit build/run, half a dozen process need to occur. This is partly why I wish they'd just put native TypeScript in the browser, simplify the build pipeline by removing several steps (and, yes, TS would evolve slower/more conservatively which I also consider a positive).

WebAssembly is the apex of this issue. Super fragile to build and impossible to debug. It is what I call "prayer based development," because you "pray" it works or troubleshooting becomes a nightmare.

curtisblaine• 1 year ago

- Diversity doesn't really make your tech team better or worse. Prioritizing for diversity when you're hiring makes your team worse.

- Cache invalidation is relatively easy; it's choosing the right strategy that is hard.

- You hate SPAs because you conflate them with running javascript, and you hate running javascript because you conflate it with predatory advertising strategies. You should hate predatory advertising strategies.

- IP clauses in job contracts contribute to the formation of monopolies and monocultures; they should be collectively fought harder than they are.

- Teaching juniors should be < 10% of a developer's job. If you want an instructor, hire an instructor.

codingclaws2• 1 year ago

JavaScript is excellent.

solardev12• 1 year ago

When I read this, the first thing that came to mind was "until you have to work with time zones". I generally enjoy working in JS, but it's such a pain point for me that I can't help but not think about it whenever I see a datetime.

It doesn't get as much mindshare as the problems with typing and frameworks and fashion trends and such, but my god, I've never seen a major, popular language with such poor support for basic time zone manipulation and storage. It is really really bad and won't be fixed until the Temporal API is stable and widely available: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

codingclaws2• 1 year ago

What app/problem requires so much JS time zone manipulation? I have an app that's front and back-end JS, and I do all time zone stuff in Postgres.

bjourne• 1 year ago

That my opinions are right and if you don't agree with me you truly suck!

solardev12• 1 year ago

That's not unpopular. I have the same opinion and I know it's right!

nom• 1 year ago

Finally, something we can all agree on!

ferguess_k• 1 year ago

I have realized this morning, when I was riding in the bus, that my habit of creating a new side project every 6 months, working on it for maybe 2-3 months of relatively high productivity, and suddenly losing interests afterwards (usually not finished, or not polished), probably means that programming is an addiction to me.

No one is using my project, and I'm not exactly learning a lot from them, except in the first half of each one because whatever afterwards is just polishing (e.g. I did an interpreter project on a Python subset a year ago, and TBH the whole concept was pretty straightforward once my brain got it in the first few weeks). It's more of an obsession and that probably explains why I got burned out after 2-3 months and COMPLETELY lost interests in it. Looking at my GitHub commit history, it is always 2-3 months of almost daily commits compensated by 3 months of absolutely non-activity.

I don't think this is the right path for me if I want to leverage my side projects to get a job in low-level programming. Either I figure out how to drill deeper into each of my projects, or I need to figure out how to remove the burnout every 2-3 months. If the market is good I'd go straight to apply for system programming jobs but right now it's even tough to keep my own job.

So this is my unpopular opinions about side project programming -- if you are like me, maybe it's time to rethink the strategy. We only have one life, and I'm already 42. Gosh! Maybe I (we) should just find another hobby.

arduinomancer3• 1 year ago

I generally don’t really care about what programming language I’m using

To me algorithms and solving problems in the abstract sense are the actual interesting part of the job

If discussing language/framework choices is the most interesting part of the job, it means I have a boring job/project/domain

Balgair• 1 year ago

It's a lot easier than you all make it out to be [0].

I'm not a 'programmer' like you all are, at best I can hack together code to get things done. I use git maybe once a year. I'm a biotech person that likes to hang out because y'all are mostly smart and the community is great here.

But man alive, this is not that difficult. Yes, it's hard to wrap your head around some nested dependancies. But it's a lot easier than any chain of protein/gene/neuron interactions. This stuff makes sense and you can edit it. My field can't really do that most of the time and it really doesn't make sense for decades (at best).

Like, I'm trying to follow along here and am mostly lost. But the few times I do know something about the code y'all are talking about, it's made out to be a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

I mean, yeah, keep that up though. Makes your bosses pay you more and lord knows those suits should be doing that and not spending the cash on rockets and shitty pick-ups.

But for real, y'all are making this out to be a lot harder than it is.

[0] this is supposed to an unpopular opinion, right?

hdkdicnsnjes• 1 year ago

Isn’t this just dunning kruger? Try and build something substantial for your gene science thing rather than some notebook script or CRUD app and see what complexity you run into.

owebmaster• 1 year ago

Dynamic languages are great and TypeScript is the stupidest thing ever.

mitchellpkt• 1 year ago

Python package management infrastructure and tooling works fine for me, and I use python frequently.

There is a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1987/

Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming?

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