Most modern software is way too complex for what it actually does.

The programming languages you use, and the variety of languages you learn, deeply influence how you think about software design.

Software would be much more reliable (in general) if Erlang had become one of the dominant languages for development.

Go sacrifices too much for superficial simplicity; but I would like to see a language that’s nearly as easy to learn, but has a better type system and fewer footguns.

Unit testing is often overrated. It is not good for discovering or protecting against most bugs.

Build/test/deploy infrastructure is a genuinely hard problem that needs better tooling, particularly for testability.

Oh boy, here we go (inhales):

Agile isn’t that bad. People just believe they are more productive if they are “heads down” and not held accountable for what they write/do.

Functional programming isn’t that great and doesn’t solve all of the world’s problems; it just pushes the issues with state to other parts of your design, and doesn’t scale well in deeply nested solutions.

IDEs with proper code support (i.e. automatic structure analysis, autocomplete, etc.) are one of the best ways to deal with a large codebase that needs refactoring. Doing widescale refactors without one is asking for trouble. If you believe you don’t need it, either your codebase is just that small (which is fine) or playing with fire.

Much of the advice out there on architecture and tooling isn’t properly contextualized on the codebase, market, and team situation. If you believe you have the One True Architecture Solution, you are naive. (Ex. Microservices, large complex code pipelines, monorepos, etc.) Be especially wary of anything from FAANG engineering blogs unless you are also in another letter of FAANG.

There. Got it out of my system. Have fun dissecting it.

This is the only way;

if (condition) {
    code
}

Not

if (condition)
{
    code
}

Also because of my dyslexia I prefer variable & function names like this; ‘File_Acces’ I find it easier to read than ‘fileAcces’

Web development feels like it’s stuck in the early 2000’s. I’ve ranted a lot about it over the years but I just don’t know how everyone is okay with it. I’m sure tons of people will disagree.

HTML is bad. The language itself feels unintuitive and is clunky compared to modern markdown languages, and let’s be honest, your webpage just consists of nested <div> tags.

CSS is bad. Who knew styling can be so unintuitive and unmanageable? Maybe it made sense 25 years ago, but now it’s just terrible. It’s very clunkily integrated with HTML too in my opinion. Styling and markdown should be one easier to use language where 50% of it isn’t deprecated.

Javascript has been memed to death so I won’t even go there. Typescript is OK I suppose.

And now for my hottest take: ~10+ years ago I saw web building tools like Wix and I completely expected web development to head in the direction using a GUI to create, style, and script from one interface, even allowing you to create and see dynamic content instantly. I’ve seen competitors and waited for “the big one” that’s actually free and open source and good enough to be used professionally. It never happened. Web dev has just gone backwards and stuck in its old ways, now it’s a bloated mess that takes way more time than it deserves.

The Godot engine is actually a pretty good option for creating GUI apps and it’s exactly what I envisioned web dev should’ve been this past decade. One language, intuitive interface, simple theming and easy rapid development… Shame it never happened.</div>

Internet would be better if javascript was never invented.

Most frameworks are garbage and most programmers that use them have no idea how they work and that makes them shitty programmers. I hate when people use frameworks without even knowing why they’re using them.

Not everything should be beginner friendly. Trying to nerf things because they are not beginner friendly should not be how tools/patterns of languages are designed.

Its ok to have more advanced topic that require more knowledge and that people don’t understand from the first moment they see them.

If you don’t add comments, even rudimentary ones, or you don’t use a naming convention that accurately describes the variables or the functions, you’re a bad programmer. It doesn’t matter if you know what it does now, just wait until you need to know what it does in 6 months and you have to stop what you’re doing an decipher it.

Programing is a lot less important than people and team dynamics

JS is horse shit. Instead of trying to improve it or using that high level scripting language as a compilation target (wtf?!), we should deprecate it entirely and put all efforts into web assembly.

Until you know a few very different languages, you don’t know what a good language is, so just relax on having opinions about which languages are better. You don’t need those opinions. They just get in your way.

Don’t even worry about what your first language is. The CS snobs used to say BASIC causes brain damage and that us '80s microcomputer kids were permanently ruined … but that was wrong. JavaScript is fine, C# is fine … as long as you don’t stop there.

(One of my first programming languages after BASIC was ZZT-OOP, the scripting language for Tim Sweeney’s first published game, back when Epic Games was called Potomac Computer Systems. It doesn’t have numbers. If you want to count something, you can move objects around on the game board to count it. If ZZT-OOP doesn’t cause brain damage, no language will.)

Please don’t say the new language you’re being asked to learn is “unintuitive”. That’s just a rude word for “not yet familiar to me”. So what if the first language you used required curly braces, and the next one you learn doesn’t? So what if type inference means that you don’t have to write int on your ints? You’ll get used to it.

You learned how to use curly braces, and you’ll learn how to use something else too. You’re smart. You can cope with indentation rules or significant capitalization or funny punctuation. The idea that some features are “unintuitive” rather than merely temporarily unfamiliar is just getting in your way.

Dynamically typed languages don’t scale. Large project bases become hard to maintain, read and refactor.

Basic type errors which should be found in compilation become runtime errors or unexpected behavior.

In unit testing, a “unit” does not have to be the smallest possible section of code. It can be a while class or module or even set of related classes/modules. Testing individual functions in isolation leads to brittle tests that easily break during refactoring. Testing overall system behaviour results in more robust tests that require fewer changes during refactoring which gives you more confidence then you have not introduced a regression.

Everybody trashing on code reviews has never worked with a shit coder before

I’m a shit coder and almost every single review I’ve made big mistakes like forgetting to delete debug/dead code and there’s always meaningful improvements being suggested