Code katas are by far the most cringe thing I've ever seen in the dev world. Second place goes to dan abramov, third goes to python's “zen of python” naïveté being baked into the fucking language itself and printed out when you write “import this”.

I think things like that arise from the misguided attempt by teachers/bloggers to leave a legacy behind. A personality to go along with whatever they are teaching.

I remember a series of guides named "learn-X-the-hard-way". They could have been better if the author focused on trying to teach rather than write mean spirited quips about whatever language he was trying to teach. His series on C was the worst.

@nitnip I remember when my uni invited Bjarne Stroustrup for a public talk. He went full on self-promotion, obviously, but what disturbed me the most is when he started showing Java code with the “// memory leak” comments under every. single. variable. declaration.

I wasn't there (bc I enrolled waaay after this talk), I've only seen photos, but he probably invented some rationale on why exactly Java's declarations are indeed some kind of memory leaks.

I don't like Java, I also don't like C++, but what I dislike the most is the toxic attitudes like this displayed to young students. They may consider you an authority in the field, and you're doing cheap tricks like this to gain notoriety. This is pathetic.

No wonder why C/Assembly boys harassed Python boys in my uni, and also harassed me for wanting to be a web developer.

@kiki Actual harrassment over programming languages? Must be nice having enough free time in college to do that kind of petty stuff.

At my Uni... every career has programming 101. When I was a freshman, I got C. This was not a choice. My career as a whole had C as a programming language in programming 101.

Other careers had different programming languages. Fortran, (mostly) Pascal, Java and Python.

Nowadays, they've kinda standarized it and everybody gets Python for programming 101.

I can't recall any instance where people got outright harassed because of a programming languages. A few quips here and there at most, but never in a mean spirited way.

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That talk you mentioned sounds rather curious. I wonder if it's available somewhere. I don't love C++, but I do enjoy it in a very casual way. I don't like just how much feature creep it has.

@nitnip I'm an alum of my uni's experimental programme that doesn't exist now. The idea was to cover all levels of abstraction organically, from physics to the web. Making your own CPU in LabView (some people made physical ones) was needed to graduate from first grade to the second. In the third grade, all that bare metal/asm/c background should've met math that was taught in parallel, and this is when python was introduced. Classic CS, the algos and stuff. BUT there was one teacher in particular that disliked python and assembled a clique of students that basically declared C supremacy and were regurgitating this all the time. They were the ones harassing others. All very talented guys but the age + the competitive mindset we all held did its job.

about Bjarne, this is the only pic I was able to find. the one about java was posted in vk (russian facebook clone), probably by a student, and is now lost