Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
as a non programmer, but someone involved in fields intimately similar in fundamental manners.
Honestly i get the feeling that languages are compilers are going to stop babying the user and go RISC-V at some point.
Who needs complex structures and tons of rules when you can just use a turing machine instead!
You can certainty do this, yet it's not time- (and hence cost-) efficient.
Use streams, or fmt. fprintf is for C. It's like people buying a cheap android phone, then going for an iPhone.
I don't blame you though, C++ carries a lot of baggabe. Modern C++ is pretty nice, though, as is Rust.
Why are you using fprintf in C++ anyway?
Go is like snakes: you're hatched from an egg and pretty much effective from the get-go. The older you get, the bigger prey you can eat, but otherwise things don't change much since you were hatched. Your species can thrive in almost any environment, you're effective, you have all the tools you need straight out of the egg.
Rust is like humans. There's a huge incubation period, and you're mostly helpless when you're born, but the older you get, the more effective you become with the tools nature graced you with. And you, like Thanos, are inevitable, even if it does mean the death of billions.
Python is like beaver. Everyone has an opinion about you: some think you're cute, some think you're wierd. You're perfectly suited to your environment, but things get awkward outside of your natural habitat - you can function, but not as well as when you're in your comfort zone. And when people encounter you where they're not expecting, they can be unpeasantly surprised, and you can cause them trouble.
C++ is like platypus. You resemble some other more simple, some might say sane, animal, but developed into a sort of frankenstein monster creature made from a jumble of parts and a stinger that, when it kills someone, comes as a shock. Every part of you serves some purpose, even if it seems tacked-on and out of place.
Then there's Node. You are everywhere. You are legion. You fill up ecosystems. People try to defend you, claiming that you serve some purpose in the foodchain, but there's scant evidence. Attempts to eradicate you fail. You often spread deadly disease. You breed, rapidly, persistently, relentlessly. You age widely hated, and yet everwhere.
Go is like snakes in that some divine creator decided that unlike all the other animals, you don't need legs, because legs are hard to make and they keep you down anyway. You can do everything legged creatures can do just fine by bending and twisting in the right ways, and anyone who suggests legs could be useful is a fool who doesn't understand what they're talking about. Sometimes, after the complains of many snakes, the creator buckles and gives you the ability to grow legs, which are still completely useless despite all of the noise and the decision not to include legs has always been the right one.
Like many snakes, Go also has some incorrect beliefs about how windows are supposed work, but like all other facets in life, they can squirm up against them as if there are no windows to worry about.
Didn’t it only recently get generics? How was stuff even done before then?
Node: You fill up ~~ecosystems~~ hard drives.
These are excellent.
I need to add Perl.
Perl is a honey bee. You are unassuming and pragmatic. You fill every niche. Your buzzing carries meaning, but only to other bees. In theory, your ecosystem niche is filled by many competing solutions that are more fit to purpose. But somehow we all know in our hearts that if you disappear, all life on the planet will probably die soon after.
May I acquaint you with the Evil Mangler, historically used by GHC to compile Haskell via C. It would go through the assembly gcc generates and rearrange whole blocks and deletes instructions, such as function prologues and epilogues.
Cannot agree with compiler part of cpp. Linker errors on the other hand...
A quick -Werror=format -Werror=format-nonliteral -Werror=format-security will solve all your printf woes.
How does Python at all help? I don't understand
I would swap Python with C++. Constantly dealing with stupid runtime errors that could’ve been easily captured during compile time.
Did you forget to rename this one use of the variable at the end of the program? Sucks for you, because I won’t tell you about it until after 30 minutes in of the execution.
you need a linter, bro
when integrated into the editor it'll highlight stupid mistakes as they're typed
sure, but thats just outsourcing the problem.
It's also a solution...
As if that's a bad thing... it means you're not locked in with a tool you don't like and the language itself doesn't dictate your workflow.
There's very little benefit and a lot of potential problems in using a single tool for everything.
My brother. That's why you do unit tests.
But are you even a real programmer if you don’t test in production?
And lint
👆 definitely linting first 👆
finding errors as you type is even better than finding errors at compile time
I shouldn’t need to do unit tests for quick one off scripts
What kind of quick one off scripts have large complex scopes where variable renames are difficult to track?
Besides, these days Python has great LSPs and typing features that can even surpass the traditional typed langs
Mostly number crunching and data exploration tasks. Just so I can make informed decisions about the data I got. I do this rarely enough so it hasn’t been worth for me to install all these extra third party support wheels.
Those support wheels are for your own (and apparently systematic) errors...
Shouldn't be forgetting for one off scripts either, if that's the logic you want to go with.
The tool exists, either you do it or you don't and end up getting an error until the interpreter hits that line. It's just the nature of being compiled at runtime.
“Ohh, I got all these numbers I want to crunch using numpy or pandas and plot it using matplotlib. Hold on, I just need to write unit tests first.”
Well. Yeah. That's test-driven development. It's a very good practice.
TDD only works well if the problem is clearly specified before the first line of code has been written, which is rarely the case when I need Python for something.
Then maybe use an editor with a decent linter and check the problems tab or just red line markers?? I also have those kind of runtime errors sometimes but I take the blame.
Yeesh. I mean, perl would tell you about that immediately, I'm just saying... :-P
Yeah, but then you have to use perl
Using perl is not the problem, now trying to read perl code later? That's the challenge! :-P
If you're using C++, why not use streams?
Yes, fprintff is a C thing.
Well, that means that it's also a C++ thing, but streams are an even slicker concept that aren't a C thing, making higher-level code look nice and shiny - and abstracting away loads of I/O pain points while encapsulating useful features.
C++ streams are ugly in their own right, but C++ preferred practice these days is to treat it as its own language rather than as a C superset. That is, lots of crufty old C stuff still works in C++ for legacy reasons, but using it when you don't have to is considered inappropriate.
The real fun about treating C++ as a superset of C begins when you run into cases where the languages differ.
I'm not talking about classes and templates and stuff like that either, I'm talking about relatively simple syntax that people expect to be present in both languages.
if (1) int a = 42;
is valid C++, but will not valid C. That's because the definition of a what a statement is differs between the two and has since the 80s!
The meme will be completely different after writing a few lines of rust for a week 😹
Dew it!