I have a friend who works for a local, but widespread bank, and got to head up their digital security and IT stuff. Not sure what all it encompasses, but he quickly found out that it was a lot, and the previous guy quit because he had had enough bullshit.
Long story shorter, after a particularly bad week, he decided to just… Stop doing his job.
Kept all their legal stuff and sensitive info under lock and key, but the smaller stuff, he just let it go. Went on vacation, turned everything off, didn’t do everything for a temporary replacement (which isn’t even his job, it’s hr’s) and spent a week playing video games and spending time with his wife and baby.
Several employees just in his building basically ended up doing nothing by the end of the first day because they had locked themselves out of the system.
By day 3 there were several lines that couldn’t be used by the tellers in every branch, older employees were bricking their systems so fast, construction workers started taking notes.
By the end of the week they had people showing up at his door to try and contact him since nobody could get ahold of him. Some legit thought he was dead.
His first words when he got into the office on Monday, we’re “THAT is why you pay me.”
And after that, he was given 3 people to help out (he had been asking for 4) and they had a company come in and redo a lot of the computer systems that year.
Still works for the bank, still has a team although I think they’re bigger now since they’ve opened a few more branches, and still tells that story at every gathering after his one single beer gets him tipsy.
Is it just me, or do programmers only come in “lightweight” and “Rivals Þor in trying to drink the oceans dry” varieties?
Is it just me, or do programmers only come in “lightweight” and “Rivals Þor in trying to drink the oceans dry” varieties?
Somehow I manage to be both. My alcohol tolerance is very high (which is great… I like a little buzz but never want to be actually drunk), but for me, one toke is over the line.
Two cocktails will get me tipsy, two beers if they’re strong, but I can drink an entire bottle of vodka (over the course of 2-3 hours) without blacking out. Or at least I could in college, I’m not looking to try again.
Reviewing large PR’s is hard. Breaking apart large PR’s that are all related changes into smaller PR’s is also hard.
If I submit a big one, I usually leave notes in the description explaining where the “core” changes are and what they are trying to accomplish. The goal being to give the reviewers a good starting point.
I also like to unit test the shit out of my code which helps a lot. The main issue there is getting management to embrace unit tests. Unit tests often double the effort up front but save tons of time in the long run. We’re going to spend the time one way or the other. Better to do it up front when it’s “cheaper” because charging it to the tech debt credit card racks up lots of expensive interest.
Yup. The libraries underneath will still allow nonsense at runtime, though, and it will now be harder to see, so it’s a partial solution as done in standard practice.
An all-TypeScript stack, if you could pull it off, would be the way to go.
Most libraries have TypeScript types these days, either bundled directly with the library (common with newer libraries), or as part of the DefinitelyTyped project.
DefinitelyTyped is the exact kind of thing I’m talking about. You put TypeScript definitions over things, but under the hood it’s still JavaScript and can fail in JavaScript ways.
It can’t fail in javascript ways that require specific sequences of code to be written, if those sequences of code aren’t in the range of output of the Typescript compiler.
If there was an easy way to use rust or something on webassemly and use that instead of JS. I’d be so happy, but I can’t find how to do it without npm.
Doesn’t look like it, unfortunately. But it’s planned. Kotlin can also compile to JavaScript with DOM manipulation. I’ve not tried either scenario, myself.
Rust would probably be the wrong tool here. This is scripting, so pointers like Rust is built around aren’t really meaningful. Kotlin or Python or something are more on the ticket.
Websites have grown beyond mere scripting.
Rust is about more than just nicer pointers, it has a very expressive type system that enables correctness rarely seen outside FP.
You can use WebAssembly today, but you still need some JS interop for a bunch of browser features (like DOM manipulation). Your core logic can be in WebAssembly though. C# has Blazor, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some Rust WebAssembly projects. I seem to recall that there’s a reimplementation of Flash player that’s built in Rust and compiles to WebAssembly.
Yeah, ideally TypeScript would be natively supported. Or maybe just Python, which is sort-of strictly typed, and definitely won’t do “wat”. Alas, it’s not the world we live in, and browsers take JavaScript.
Python supports type hints, but you need to use a type checker like Pyre or Pyright to actually check them. Python itself doesn’t do anything with the type hints.
The libraries underneath will still allow nonsense at runtime
Only if you use a badly written library. Most libraries have types provided by DefinitelyTyped. Those who don’t are (in my experience) so tiny that you probably aren’t using them; or, if you really wanted, can check yourself.
In the end, if you encounter a bug, it’ still 99% of the time not a library’s fault, even if it’s written in plain JS.
Like I said to the other person, those are just types over top of JavaScript that can still fail if/when coercion happens under the hood.
I don’t even know how to search it now, but a specific example came up on here of a time when JavaScript libraries will cause problems, and problems you can’t even see very well if you’re expecting it to act strictly-typed.
By that logic what we really need is a modernization of Ada, where there are no compiler warnings and anything that would generate one in another language is instead a compiler error, everything is strongly typed, etc, etc.
If you aren’t familiar with Ada, just imagine Pascal went to military school.
That analogy was chosen for a reason. Ada was originally developed by DOD committee and a French programming team to be a programming language for Defense projects between 1977 and 1983 that they were still using at least into the early 2000s. It’s based on Pascal.
It was intended for applications where reliability was the highest priority (above things like performance or ease of use) and one of the consequences of that is that there are no warnings - only compiler errors, and a lot of common bad practices that will be allowed to fly or maybe at worst generate a warning in other languages will themselves generate compiler errors. Do it right or don’t bother trying. No implicit typecasting, even something like 1 + 0.5 where it’s obvious what is intended is a compiler error because you are trying to add an integer to a real without explicitly converting either - you’re in extremely strongly-typed country here.
Libraries are split across two files, one is essentially the interfaces for the library and the other is it’s implementation (not that weird, and not that different than C/C++ header files though the code looks closer to Pascal interface and implementation sections put in separate files). The intent at the time being that different teams or different subcontractors might be building each module and by establishing a fixed interface up front and spelling out in great detail in documentation what each piece of that interface is supposed to do the actual implementation could be done separately and hypothetically have a predictable result.
programmer_humor
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.