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What is your pettiest programming-related opinion?

Peter Kim Frank on May 13, 2020

What is the most meaningless, silly, un-important programming-related opinion that you'll just continue to defend? We're all familiar with Tabs vs...
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Dan Keefe

Anyone who writes more efficient code than me is pretentious.

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Ben Halpern

πŸ˜„πŸ˜„πŸ˜„

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Forest Hoffman • Edited

This gonna be good GIF

WordPress is an over-complicated and out-dated framework that shouldn't be used for anything more complex than a plain-text blog.

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Francisco Quintero πŸ‡¨πŸ‡΄

😱 I'm not going to discuss but gonna tell you're not 100% correct. ✌🏽

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Forest Hoffman

I see what you did there :D

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Ben Halpern

What a wholesome community πŸ€—

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Nikola Stojaković

I don't agree it's overcomplicated but it definitely should be used only for the blogs and small shops in my opinion. For everything bigger it quickly becomes a disaster.

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Mazen Touati

BloodPress

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Forest Hoffman

That sounds so metal 🀘

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Simo

CSS-in-JS is a mess, framework or not.

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Zach Rosenberger

What makes styled-components garbage?

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Aleksandr Hovhannisyan

Because anything you can do in styled-components you can also do in plain CSS stylesheets + JS, using proper class names. You can even pass props and conditionally apply different class names.

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Zach Rosenberger

Yes, the same goal can be achieved with plain CSS stylesheets + JS, but I don't see why that makes styled-components garbage. I suppose it comes down to preference for minor improvements with one option for styling over another.

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Aleksandr Hovhannisyan

It's trying to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist.

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Andrew Brown πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦

But seriously. use spaces.

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OJordan

indent with tabs align with spaces dmitryfrank.com/articles/indent_wi...

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πŸ¦„N BπŸ›‘ • Edited

Tabs and spaces?
Have you learned nothing from American "politics" or Twitter?
Compromise is weakness AND WEAKNESS IS DEATH!

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Sdu

Just make your IDE to use space characters when you press tab. Done, everybody wins

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CamDHall

I get the argument for spaces and all, but as someone who has vision problems 2-space indention makes my life way more difficult. I mean I'm not against adjusting my own workspace to accommodate the rest of them team since I'm the only person who has several vision impairments, but I'm honestly still not convinced the difference justifies the extra work.

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Andrew Brown πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦

The heading of this article is petty opinions, so there is no justification.

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Michiel Hendriks

You may think Tabs vs. Spaces is a petty opinion, until you realize that using tabs makes a world of difference for visually impaired people.

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Felix Terkhorn

Never thought of this. I have a little bit of trouble with my eyesight and use very large font sizes (22+). Interested to try this πŸ˜‰

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Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Any language is more suitable to a task than Javascript.

(It's only partially objective. I have technical reasons for my hatred of Javascript, but I try to accept that it has uses. I'd just sooner change careers than use Javascript in any measurable amount.)

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Bosley • Edited

I am of the personal opinion that JS is hot garbage.

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Nicolus • Edited

I think that's the consensus.
I mean Javascript is the only language that's so bad that both Google and Microsoft had to create other languages that transpile to it (with Dart and Typescript) to avoid writing javascript.

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Yufan Lou

OTOH, JavaScript may be the closest to Lisp an Algol descendant gets.

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Igor Irianto • Edited

But developers who use spaces make more money.
stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/15/deve...

tab-space

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Andrew Brown πŸ‡¨πŸ‡¦

The creator of Python said if he had to go back in time he would have made 2 space mandatory to stop this space vs tabs wars.

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Michiel Hendriks • Edited

Guido van Rossum prefers tabs [1].

I think putting any kind of semantics in things you cannot print is a big mistake. This includes newlines like used in JavaScript.

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Ben Halpern

lol

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Edited
  • TypeScript is a righteous dynamic programming wrapper. Every dynamic programming languages should follow TypeScript's example.
  • Password fields do not ever need to be masked.
  • Writing password on a paper is safer than using password manager.
  • 2FA / MFA are good password policies.
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rhymes

We do not need so many programming languages. We do not need so many frameworks.

How many times are we going to "re-implement" the same function to read a file in memory or to send a HTTP message over the wire or to display a button with text that does something on click? πŸ‘€

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Craig McIlwrath

Maybe no individual needs all these options, but not everyone will agree on which style of language/framework is the best. It's a matter of taste, so I think it's great that we have many to choose from.

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rhymes

I agree there's value in having so much R&D going on from multiple communities, but the question is "What is your pettiest programming related opinion" so I thought this qualified.

I believe WASI has the potential to change things down the line. We can all keep the languages we want, but at least we can stop writing basic functionality like "write a synchronous HTTP/2 server". So many replicated man hours in that.

Also, imagine how better in quality and in regards to security vulnerabilities if most languages were built on the same building blocks.

There's also the counter argument of centralizing vulnerabilities but hey, I didn't think this through :D

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Claudio Davi

swtich statements have no real use case that could not be implemented using other simpler features of the language.

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Sophie The Lionhart

I will die on this hill with you. Back to back, mini gun aiming down the hill, mowing down anything that comes our way except food delivery.

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Claudio Davi

have you ever had a legit use case for switch?

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Sophie The Lionhart

I mean I think in finite lists they can have some application. Think like cardinal directions(Noth, East, South, West), basically TRUE Enums, absolutely finite ones. They can be useful sometimes in those cases. You could in theory use a strategy pattern or something even then, and be a more robust solution but it could be seen as over-engineering. If you MUST use one or have a case like above, I always like to throw an exception in the default case. If it shouldn't occur and does, I for sure want to know about it, and I don't want something weak like it being logged. I want it to be a mini-crisis.

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Craig McIlwrath

Following that logic, there is no use case for a for loop.

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Claudio Davi

But really, can you give me a legit use case?
I cannot think of one single thing that is not a bad pattern switch(true) or could not be solved with an if and early return.

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Simon Landry

Switch cases are syntactic sugar for writing repetitive if and else if statements, not a language feature. Just like the for loop, you could write a while loop that does exactly the same thing.

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Koushik KM • Edited

Unit testing is overrated and should focus more on integration and E2E tests :D

Popcorn

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Avichay Eyal

Naming coventions,
Readability of switch -case,
Curly style, egyptian or line separated,
Number of arguments in function signature

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Alex Lohr

My biggest pet peeve is when people say that X was superior to Y, be it vim vs. emacs, interpreted vs. compiled language, strong vs. weak typing, etc.

There's a problem for every solution, just don't try to make it fit by brute force.

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πŸ¦„N BπŸ›‘ • Edited

"Bitcoin" is an uncountable noun. So is "bitcoin." So is "code," in the context of computer programming. No more of this "I wrote you some codes." No, no, no.

And I will die on that hill.

P.S. Slack Threads respect each others' time, these programming languages should be called programming notations, not programming languages, and hey this, over here, is a configuration language, not a programming language, Dvorak is better, they're capitalized as ReDiS and CEntOS, metaphors about the name of the Python programming language should involve more flying circuses than snakes, plural of status is status (from the Latin genitive neutral declension), DevOps is not a job title and DevSecOps is not a thing, and for some reason I can't stand multi-line comment syntax even when someone has made an effort to use it right. On a slightly more practical note come on man for the love of whatever God you hold dear use footnotes instead of endnotes in your publications. Some of us neither should nor can be arsed.

Wow, I'm a petty person.

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Fulton Browne

Mac os and widows stink for programming they are way to locked down and aren't widely used in production environments. In my opinion linux of bsd should be used for everything except apple apps (all of them), windows apps, and situation where Visual Studio is required.

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Yufan Lou • Edited

That most programming languages do not interoperate is evidence that it doesn't take a God to prevent human languages from interoperating.

EDIT: On one hand, every language should have been Lisp. On the other hand, how did even Lisp become split among Common Lisp, Scheme, and Clojure?

EDIT: Pandoc is an honorable struggle against God's will. It reflects on how GHC with different extensions are totally different languages, yet it is still one GHC.

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Mat

React syntax is gross. Having markup inside a JS function is backwards.

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katy lavallee

i like it better than having weird attributes in markup that represent programming logic.

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John Kazer

Functional JavaScript is better than typescript.

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Dave Parr • Edited

Fonts designed for programming should have ligature support, and all IDEs should support ligatures.

GitHub logo tonsky / FiraCode

Free monospaced font with programming ligatures

Fira Code: free monospaced font with programming ligatures

Problem

Programmers use a lot of symbols, often encoded with several characters. For the human brain, sequences like ->, <= or := are single logical tokens, even if they take two or three characters on the screen. Your eye spends a non-zero amount of energy to scan, parse and join multiple characters into a single logical one. Ideally, all programming languages should be designed with full-fledged Unicode symbols for operators, but that’s not the case yet.

Solution

Fira Code is a free monospaced font containing ligatures for common programming multi-character combinations. This is just a font rendering feature: underlying code remains ASCII-compatible. This helps to read and understand code faster. For some frequent sequences like .. or //, ligatures allow us to correct spacing.

Download & Install

Then:

Support

Fira Code is a…

I just found out RStudio doesn't support ligatures on Linux, and now I HAVE to decide if I'm going to compromise my IDE or my OS.

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Nicholas Stimpson

Do not annotate your Java class with who the author was. Your version control app will record this far more reliably than you will.

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Sdu

Flutter web is a mistake, an expensive mistake. Google should have focused on Flutter for mobile development and AngularDart for web client stuff.

They are treating Flutter like it's this one tool fix all solution of which that will never work. IT WILL NEVER WORK!!! The difference between the dart ecosystem and the javascript ecosystem, in javascript for eatch plartform, there's a framework that works beautifully for it e.g. Vuejs/React for web, ReactNative for mobile (Where Flutter actually stands a chance) and Electron for Desktop,

BUT in dart land, noooo. They want Flutter for web, flutter for desktop, flutter for mobile, like REALLY??

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Itachi Uchiha

While I use spaces, my mom like a monster. She doesn’t like spaces because of tick tick voices.

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Jochem Stoel

PHP is dead, Web Components are crap and I don't need to write comments in my code because it is super obvious and semantically optimized.

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Stephen Belovarich

Oh this is going to be good.

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Mike Rispoli

You should be using class names on your DOM elements to help people navigate the code base whether you style them or not, preferably BEM syntax.

Emotion and other libraries that try to just sell me into writing inline styles again can die a slow death.

 
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Craig McIlwrath

Yeah, having some common AST that can be targeted to different outputs (native code, jvm, js, etc) would be cool to have.

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katy lavallee

There are two things the python formatter black does that I hate, and that makes me not want to use it at all.

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Fredrik SjΓΆstrand

When naming variables, snake_case is better than camelCase

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Michiel Hendriks

I have no petty programming related opinions, they are all important opinions. ... I think this is my petty opinion πŸ˜‰

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Dylan Anderson

4 spaces, not 2.

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Anthony L

I read on Twitter earlier this week that it is Xcode. Not XCode, xCode, X-Code, 10-code, etc. and it is definitely not iWatch. IOS and macos are also out too.

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πŸ¦„N BπŸ›‘

Note that Mr. Withayasakpunt used the word "safer," not "more secure."

I have many times lived the difference.

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Stefanos Kouroupis

unit tests in some languages (i.e C# or Rust) do not need to have a spec like syntax

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Jukka Paulin

Java's habit of having super long function and variable names. Yuck! :D