Programmer Humor

Ahhhh, the ol' "dynamic languages are better than static languages because I have tests that check for different types" argument.

This is an absolute terrible post :/ I cannot believe he thinks that is a good argument at all. It basically boils down to:

Here is a new feature modern languages are starting to adopt.

You might thing that is a good thing. Lists various reasonable reasons it might be a good thing.

The question is: Whose job is it to manage that risk? Is it the language’s job? Or is it the programmer’s job?

And then moves on to the next thing in the same pattern. He lists loads of reasonable reasons you might want the feature gives no reasons you would not want it and but says everything in a way to lead you into thinking you are wrong to think you want these new features while his only true arguments are why you do want them...

It makes no sense.

His take strangely acknowledges that defects are caused by programmers, yet doesn’t want to improve the tools we use to help us not make these mistakes. In summary, git gud.

Experience has taught me that I’m awfully good at finding and firing foot guns, and when I use a language that has fewer foot guns along with good linting, I write reliable code because I tend to focus on what I want the code to do, not how to get there.

Declarative functional programming suits me down to the ground. OOP has been friendly to me, mostly, but it also has been the hardest to understand when I come back to it. Experience has given me an almost irrational aversion to side effects, and my simple mind considers class members as side effects

To my knowledge, the Rust's book actually encourages writing as many automated tests as you can, as the compiler can't catch every type of bug in existance.

rather strongly typed Java.

[In Java] you can also violate many of the type rules whenever you want or need to

Okay. Well maybe being able to not spell out types every single time would also count as not burdening the programmer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I bought Clean Code when I started learning programming, some of it was useful, but now I understand that it was too opinionated for a beginner

Edit: also

Whose job is it to manage that risk? Is it the language’s job? Or is it the programmer’s job[?]

It is language's job to enforce risk management wherever possible, humans are demonstrated time and time again to be poor at risk management (same for the other questions like 'whose job it is to check for nulls'

Edit2:

Defects are the fault of programmers. It is programmers who create defects

… and that is why he proposes to not help programmers with language means. I never thought that views of how problems should be tackled might differ so much while having in mind the same reasons and goals.

Albeit I do agree that one must write tests, even if language helps, not everything can reasonably be automatically checked

Funny how he is actually now a fan of Clojure yet the examples in his book are actually full of mutating data and side effects. And Rich Hickey also stressed that tests are no silver bullet.

wtf did i just read?

Java is a fine choice. Much prefer it over pseudocode.