What Typescript drama is there? It’s fantastic. It’s been an industry standard for years. In my anecdotal experience the only people that hate it are juniors who did pure JS at their bootcamp and seniors that have refused to learn anything for the last 5 years.
Some people think better with typing information explicitly written out. Some people don’t. In my opinion it is a creativity thing. Some people like to make art that is photo realistic, some people like to make abstract art.
I understand both viewpoints. In my free time I vastly prefer late bound, dynamically types languages with robust reflection engineers built into their interpreters. For work, I heavily prefer late bound, strictly typed with reflection optional or minimal.
I think that’s fine if that’s how you like to work on your own, but I’d challenge anyone to do that and write better documentation while also getting a team or whole business to do the same. A huge strength of TS is that it gives people no choice but to document their work.
I didn’t say JavaScript… and I certainly wouldn’t choose TS for a personal project because I personally feel that its organization is terrible but I would choose TS over vanilla js for work projects because it does produce better group work and is easier to maintain long term because of the structure imposed on it.
TS is amazingly powerful when it comes to refactoring. I swear it practically writes itself. Half the time by the time I fix all the compiler errors the refactoring is done. I barely need to think about it which means I can spend more time thinking about the best architecture. When people say they don’t see how TS makes you more productive it just makes me think they never refactor their code.
DHH (guy who founded Ruby on Rails) ripped typescript out of a supporting library and swapped it for JavaScript. He did it in his typical fashion of not allowing discussion and being a dick (PR only open for a couple hours and then merged disregarding all the negative feedback about the change) . So people are mad at him again.
He does stupid shit like this all the time because he’s a fucking knob.
RoR will always have a special place in my heart, but yeah… DHH sure does have opinions. What possible justification is there for removing it when it’s already there? Guess someone could just shift the types out to DT.
Edit: So I read his blog post about it. He’s dropping it because he just doesn’t like it and he’s allowed to not like it. Okay then 🤷
You only have to read the PR comments with people asking how you know if something is optional when there is absolutely zero jsdoc to know it was idiotic.
While you may compile dialects into it, you still have to accept the fact that running code in the browser means running JavaScript. So being able to write that, free of any tooling, and free of any strong typing, is a blessing under the circumstances.
By his logic, JS linters are bad because they’re tooling that restricts your access to all of Javascript. But linters mean you don’t have to read PRs with a fine tooth comb to make sure there’s no footguns like using == instead of ===.
Also, you could use that same logic to advocate for writing JVM bytecode directly instead of Java/Kotlin/Scala/Clojure/etc.
The question is really whether tooling pays its way in terms of lower bug rates, code that’s easier for coworkers to read, and code that’s easier to reason about.
Svelte decided to ditch it because it became impractical due to the compilation step slowing down development and making debugging their compiler harder. I think for libraries it makes sense to go the jsdoc way as long as consumers can choose typescript.
For what? If they took it away, the source code would still be there if someone wanted to fork it. Not to mention removing TypeScript from an application is relatively trivial.
They’re not that dumb, to just pull it completely. That would obviously result in a successful fork.
Companies usually start with e.g. the BUSL, so source-available but proprietary restrictions.
For TypeScript/Microsoft, I could imagine some variation of their EEE playbook.
But really, the whole point of avoiding Microsoft et al, is that I don’t want to think about, how they could fuck this whole thing up. They’ve proven quite creative in this regard for as long as they’ve existed.
I feel like there’s no typescript drama, just JavaScript drama. Things are pretty happy in the TS community. I’ve been writing js code since it literally first came out. I’m definitely no js hater. In the early days js code bases quickly turned to spaghetti code, but I genuinely think the js community has done miracles turning what was essentially a super simplistic toy language into a seriously good production quality language. I’ve seen first hand how much work has gone into it, and while most of the js community has been great with embracing change for the better, there’s always been the niche of detractors against any change that adds complexity even when it makes coding safer and more productive.
I’ve always had a love hate relationship with JavaScript, but with typescript it’s really been just straight up love. Pretty much all the trouble I have with typescript has been due to external libraries that use types lazily or incorrectly, and even then there are solutions to add safety to your own codebase. Sometimes I run into some trouble with the type system itself, but it’s pretty much always because I’m doing something really complicated that would be hard in any type system. I’ve been working with typescript for years now and my code bases are some of the most solid ones in my company. Typescript is really safe as long as you’re actually using it and not telling the compiler to ignore types through using any or making unsafe assertions.
It makes no difference to me if other people prefer JavaScript. Any important js library will get ts support anyways through definitely typed, and if a library is so sloppy it can’t be typed well then it’s not a good library to use anyways. Having people proudly announce they only want to use JavaScript is also great for hiring. It easily tips me off on who not to hire.
The CEO now seeks help from Phutar Afrayughum, a psychic and extrasensory perception specialist who allegedly helped Google increase their marketshare in the messaging app market, and was also involved in developing the Material Design framework.
“In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.”
No perl either. Much like python you find a relevant library (in cpan), but unlike python there will be seven different implementations, and any four perl devs will come up with at least ten solutions, nine of which will successfully rescue the princess
Everything will seem to be be going great, but to actually gain access to the castle you’ll have to compare your situation to successful rescues to find the undocumented drawbridge control
Oh the idea is that it hunts down users across different social media accounts with limited information. Just a way to automate something someone could do themselves.
As you can see here though, it checks a lot of sites
I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the program at all =)
Modern webapp deployment approach is typically to have an automated continuous build and deployment pipeline triggered from source control, which deploys into a staging environment for testing, and then promotes the same precise tested artifacts to production. Probably all in the cloud too.
Compared to that, manually FTPing the files up to the server seems ridiculously antiquated, to the extent that newbies in the biz can’t even believe we ever did it that way. But it’s genuinely what we were all doing not so long ago.
It’s that automated workflow ? With human checkpoints ?
Like, a programmer will ‘hit save’ and drop his work in version control, which automatically lands in a development environment, is promoted to test, and lands in the queue of a tester, and so on ?
Like anything else, it’s good to know how to do it in many different ways, it may help you down the line.
In production in an oddball environment, I have a python script to ftp transfer to a black box with only ftp exposed as an option.
Another system rebuilds nightly only if code changes, publishing to a QC location. QC gives it a quick review (we are talking website here, QC is “text looks good and nothing looks weird”), clicks a button to approve, and it gets published the following night.
I’ve had hardware (again, black box system) where I was able to leverage git because it was the only command exposed. Aka, the command they forgot to lock down and are using to update their device. Their intent was to sneakernet a thumb drive over to it for updates, I believe in sneaker longevity and wanted to work around that.
So you should know how to navigate your way around in FTP, it’s a good thing! But I’d also recommend learning about all the other ways as well, it can help in the future.
(This comment brought to you by “I now feel older for having written it”, and “I swear I’m only in my fourties,”)
Nah, it’s probably more efficient to .tar.xz it and use netcat.
On a more serious note, I use sftp for everything, and git for actual big (but still personal) projects, but then move files and execute scripts manually.
And also, I cloned my old Laptops /dev/sda3 to my new Laptops /dev/main/root (on /dev/mapper/cryptlvm) via netcat over a Gigabit connection with netcat. It worked flawlessly. I love Linux and its Philosophy.
Netcat is basically just a utility to listen on a socket, or connect to one, and send or receive arbitrary data. And as, in Linux, everything is a file, which means you can handle every part of your system (eg. block devices [physical or virtual disks]) like a normal file, i.e. text, you can just transfer a block device (e.g. /dev/sda3) over raw sockets.
It’s perfectly fine for some private page etc. but when you make business software for customers that require 99,9% uptime with severe contractual penalties it’s probably too wonky.
Think of this like saying using a scythe to mow your lawn is antiquated. If your lawn is tiny then it doesn’t really matter. But we’re talking about massive “enterprise scale” lawns lol. You’re gonna want something you can drive.
Shitty companies did it like that back then - and shitty companies still don’t properly utilize what easy tools they have available for controlled deployment nowayads. So nothing really changed, just that the amount of people (and with that, amount of morons) skyrocketed.
I had automated builds out of CVS with deployment to staging, and option to deploy to production after tests over 15 years ago.
It’s good practice to run the deployment pipeline on a different server from the application host(s) so that the deployment instances can be kept private, unlike the public app hosts, and therefore can be better protected from external bad actors. It is also good practice because this separation of concerns means the deployment pipeline survives even if the app servers need to be torn down and reprovisioned.
Of course you will need some kind of agent running on the app servers to be able to receive the files, but that might be as simple as an SSH session for file transfer.
But it’s genuinely what we were all doing not so long ago
Jokes on you, my first job was editing files directly in production. It was for a webapp written in Classic ASP. To add a new feature, you made a copy of the current version of the page (eg index2_new.asp became index2_new_v2.asp) and developed your feature there by hitting the live page with your web browser.
When you were ready to deploy, you modified all the other pages to link to your new page
Of course, it’s going to be difficult to find a modern application where each individually deployed component isn’t at least 7MB of compiled source (and 50-200MB of container), compared to this single 7MB war that contained everything.
Except that FileZilla does come with bundled adware from their sponsors and they do want you to pay for the pro version. It probably is the shittiest GPL-licensed piece of software I can think of.
The question is about “superpermutations”. The permutations of 1 and 2 are “12” and “21”. A “superpermutation” would be “1221”. It contains the numbers 1 and 2 as well as all permutations of 1 and 2. However “121” is also a superpermutation of 1 and 2. It also contains “12” and “21” and it’s shorter than “1221”.
The problem is finding the shortest superpermutation. Stand-up Maths has a video where he interviews a mathematician that published Anonymous’ solution. So yes, there is a math paper where the main author is “Anonymous 4chan Poster”.
I seriously could not believe what I was watching when I got to that part. I would start the next one thinking “there is no way… Yep, again”. How did the director even convince people to do it?
As annoying as it was to slog through the episodes (I think I went through 5 of them before realizing I wasn’t missing much skipping the other three), there is something to be said about how much it captures that feeling of uselessness that Kyo and Yuki have. Kyo begins to realize each time and Yuki is forced to be aware through each repetition. Haruhi is so powerful that she creates an endless time loop, that was both amazing and terrifying.
She can’t interfere, her job is to monitor and observe and only stop Haruhi if she’s going to endanger the universe. So even with the ability to stop her, she can’t do anything by the code of her position.
Thats the thing, she does interfere, but just enough that it keeps happening. 100% no interference would be not even telling them that there is a loop going on when they try to find out
Backend Requirements: “When x,y goes in, I want x+y to come out!” - Okay
Frontend Requirements: “Well it needs to be more user-friendly, and have this rockstar wow effect” - Yea wtf are you even talking about? You want me to add random glitter explosions, because I found a script for that, that’s pretty ‘wow effect’ right?
Isn’t our main audience German? If you wanted non German stuff you shoulda asked for regional translations. Not only is that a change request, but you’re gonna be pushing the release window by months.
I spent years as a mobile developer and the thing that always drove me the most nuts was being handed a software design with lots of tiny buttons that were nearly impossible to tap with a finger. I generally implemented the UI by increasing the size of the tappable regions (without increasing the apparent size of the buttons) making it actually usable, but one time the designer discovered that I was doing this and went apeshit and convinced the project manager to order me to undo all this and make the tappable regions the same size as the buttons. The grounds for this was that implementing the larger tappable regions would take too much extra time - despite the fact that this had already been done and it took additional time to undo it.
I usually just do what they requested and when they come to complain I just tell them “well, you’re the one who requested this” and pull up receipts. My DM to myself on Slack is filled with screenshots and links to confirmations for bullshit requests that the product team made.
Real back-end requirements: when x, y goes in (in JSON-as-an-XML-CDATA-block because historical reasons), I want you to output x+y+z+æ+the proof to P=NP.
æ will require you yo compile x+y in CSV, email it to Jenny, who will email back the answer. She doesn’t quite know how to export excel sheets though so you’d better build a robust validator. No, we don’t know what æ is supposed to look like, Rob from Frontend knows but he’s on vacation for the next 8 months.
The request must be processed under 100 ms as the frontend team won’t be able to prioritize asynchronous loading for another 10 sprints and we don’t want the webpage to freeze.
And why does your API return a 400 when I send a picture of my feet? Please fix urgently, these errors are polluting my monitoring dashboard and we have KPIs on monitoring alerts.
Yea, fair enough. My point was mostly: backend requirements are usually at least objective. “Json xml comes in”, “CSV goes out by email”, “The request must be processed under 100 ms”, “API should not return 400 on feetpics” - these are still mostly objective requirements.
Frontend requirements can be very subjective “The user should have a great user experience with the frontend”
Hahaha that’s what frontend devs think, but the backend requirements are just as vague: “Just make this button work”. In my example all the requirements would actually be figured out bit by bit over months, nevermind the prescience required to foresee future architecture-breaking features or scaling requirements. At least you can make a mockup and get instant feedback, flawed as it is.
On either side it takes experienced engineers to suss out actual requirements from customers/PMs. The main difference is that the backend (especially on the infra/devops side) is only accountable to itself if everything goes well, but ironically that means no-one knows or cares about the amount of engineering that goes into keeping PMs blissfully ignorant of the risks and complexity.
Hahah, well as a primarily backend developer, that’s what I think as well.
“Just make this button work”
If that button doesn’t work, that sounds like a frontend problem to me… ;)
But yea, as you mentioned, it probably comes down to experience. As the meme from this post depicts. When I dabble in frontend and make a WinForm for my devtool, people just look at me and are like “Uhhh, can you make it better?”
No sir, clearly I can not. And I have no idea what you mean with “better”.
Yeah if you have shitty UX people frontend will just built what they’re told. Or actually more often, you could have really talented UX people and management decisions are like “needs more buy now buttons, the 3 visible on the screen aren’t enough.” Shit flows downhill
Man, if only backend demands were algebraically tractable. Often they’re related to frontend demands that may or may not make backend sense, since the frontend is all users see.
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