Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

It's not that I hate PHP, I just hate the lack of consistency in standard function naming and parameter order, nonsensical attribute access, nearly-meaningless comparison operators, reference handling, case (in)sensitivities, and more!

I mean, look at these functions:
strtoupper(...)
bin2hex(...)
strtolower(...)

And look at THESE FUNCTIONS:
array_search($needle, $haystack)
strpos($haystack, $needle)

array_filter($array, $callable)
array_map($callback, $array)
array_walk($array, $callable)

And let me jUST USE SOME ATTRIBUTES:
$object->attr = "No dollar sign...";
Class::$attr = "GOD WHY";

HOW ABOUT SOME COMPARISONS:
(NULL == 0) // true
(NULL < -1) // ALSO true

Functions AREN'T CASE SENSITIVE (at least variables are).

Wanna dereference? TOO BAD, YOU'LL HAVE TO GET OUT THE TNT.

Alright, yeah, I hate PHP.

C is not that hard:

void (* (* f[ ]) () ) () declares f to be array of unspecified size, of pointers to functions, which return pointers to functions which return void.

By the way, I am uncomfortable with the fact that I am comfortable with this statement.

The guy where I can only shake my head when I see his code, and he is really proud of if implementations, while he

- doesn't care about warnings

- breaks builds and doesn't care

- doesn't care about code styles and indents in a very column based way

- adds tons of comments to his code, mostly hard to understand, and sometimes that much you can hardly find the code

- implements a tokenizer where you have to inherit from its interface (Why would I wanna implement whole functions for a tokenizer and not just use it in place where needed? How do I use two of those in one class?)

- implement a "generic" state machine base class with fixed lengths array of 3 events and 3 strings (Why would I need events and strings hardcoded in a "generic" state machine? Why a maximum of 3?)

- once delivered a software without the needed runtime components, so the whole system (embedded device) wasn't working properly and only by chance missed the point of disabling update mechanisms

- make your ears bleed about his big inventions whenever he sees you, no matter how often he already told you about that blazing new feature

WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.

The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.

Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.

My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.

And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.

And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.

And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.

And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.

I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.

My wife wouldn't stop asking me to help her with FB. As a joke I told her if she didn't quit, I'd delete it (Tech stuff goes over her head like a 747). Well, she kept on so I opened up the Dev tools. I started by adding just some non sense to one of the divs. She saw it pop up on screen and was like "Wait...you can really do that?" then I highlighted the body tag and hit backspace. The whole thing disappeared, it was great. She legit freaked out for a minute and begged me to fix it. I popped up the console and started typing random things. Created an array with some mumbo-jumbo, a couple of quick, meaningless functions and snuck hitting Ctrl+R in there, refreshing the page. She was so happy that Facebook worked again, that she stopped asking me how to do whatever it was

I come from PHP and have been using jQuery as a crutch for years. I've dabbled in Node and obviously writing some vanilla JS is unavoidable, but now I'm starting to use ES6 with Babel and VueJS and the more I dig in, the more I hate javascript. Everything is an object (null, array), there seems to be a few gotchas with math (including the one pictured), nothing is strongly typed but types are very important (for instance, you can't loop an object and an array using the same code), and there are a lot of inconsistencies/functions missing. ucwords for instance. Why doesn't that exist? typeof only returns object, but Array.isArray and Object.isObject work fine. I'm going to give typescript a go soon and cross my fingers.

Yesterday, my new (Irish) co-worker comes to my desk and asks me a question about an issue in his code.
His commenting all done in Irish.
Him: "If you want me I can translate the comments for you?"
Me: "Ní gá, is féidir liom é a léamh go foirfe." ("No need to, I can read it perfectly fine")
co-worker looking at me like: "wtf just happened?"

After a while, I spotted the issue (I noticed the expected output from one of the functions not being of the correct format - an integer instead of an array).
So I fixed it.

Next day (this morning) I came back at work, looked into my food drawer to see what I would eat for breakfast (yes, I have a drawer specifically for food, and yes, I eat breakfast at work), found a small box containing an Ulster Fry :D

Best breakfast at work in a long time :D

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

When defining a range, let's say from 1 to 3, I expect:

[1, 2, 3]

Yet most range functions I come across, e.g. lodash, will do:

_.range(1, 3)
=> [1, 2]

And their definition will say: "Creates an array of numbers ... progressing from start up to, but not including, end."

Yet why the fuck not including end? What don't I understand about the concept of a frigging range that you won't include the end?

The only thing I can come up with that's this is related to the array's-indexes-start with-0-thing and someone did not want to substract `-1` when preparing a for loop over an 10 items array with range(0,10), even though they do not want a range of 0 to 10, they want a range from 0 to 9. (And they should not use a for loop here to begin with but a foreach construct anyway.)

So the length of your array does not match the final index of your array.

Bohhoo.

Yet now we can have ranges with very weird steps, and now you always have to consider your proper maximum, leading to code like:

var start = 10;
var max = 50;
var step = 10;

_.range(start, max + step, step)
=> [10, 20, 30, 40, 50]

and during code review this would scream "bug!" in my face.

And it's not only lodash doing that, but also python and dart.

Except php. Php's range is inclusive. Good job php.

I fucking hate chained methods. Ok, not all of them. Query things like array.where.first... that stuff is ok.

Specially if it's part of the std lib of a lang, which would be probably written by a very competent coder and under scrutiny.
But if you're not that person, chances are you'll produce VASTLY inferior code.

I'm talking about things like:
expect(n).to.be(x).and.not(y)

And the reason I don't like it is because it's all fine and dandy at first.

But once you get to the corner cases, jesus christ, prepare to read some docpages.

You end up reading their entire fucking docs (which are suboptimal sometimes) trying to figure if this fucking dsl can do what you need.

Then you give up and ask in a github issue. And the dev first condescends you and then tells you that the beautiful eden of code he created doesn't let you do what you want.

The corner cases usually involve nesting or some very specific condition, albeit reasonable.

This kind of design is usually present in testing or validation js libraries. And I hate all of those for it.

If you want a modern js testing lib that doesn't suck ass, check avajs. It's as simple as testing should be.

No magic globals, no chaining, zero config. Fuck globals forced by libs.

But my favorite thing about it that is I can put a breakpoint wherever the fuck I want and the debugger stops right fucking there.

Code is basically lines of statements, that's it, and by overusing chaining, by encouraging the grouping of dozens of statements into one, you are preventing me from controlling these statements on MY code.

As an end dev, I only expect complexity increases to come from the problems themselves rather than from needlessly "beautified" apis.

When people create their own shitty dsl, an image comes to my mind of an incoherent rambling man that likes poetry a lot and creates his own martial art, which looks pretty but will get your ass kicked against the most basic styles of fighting.

I fucking hate esoteric code.

Even if I had to execute a list of functions, I'd rather send them in an array instead of being able to chain them because:
a) tree shaking would spare from all the functions i didn't import
b) that's what fucking arrays are for, to contain several things.

This bad style of coding is a result of how low the barrier to code in higher level langs are.

As a language or library gets easier to use you might think that's a positive thing. But at the same time it breeds laziness.

Js has such a low learning curve that it attacts the wrong kind of devs, the lazy, the uninspired, the medium.com reader, the "i just care about my paycheck" ones.

Someone might think that by bashing bad js devs I'm trying to elevate myself.

That'd be extremely stupid. That's like beating a retarded blind man in a game and then saying "look, I'm way better than this retarded blind man".

I'm not on a risky point of view, just take a stroll down npmjs.com. That place is a landfill. Not really npm's fault, in fact their search algorithm is good.

It's just the community.

Every lang has a ratio of competence. Of competent to incompetent devs.

You have the lang devs and most intelligent lib devs at the top. At the bottom you have the bottom.

Well js has a horrible ratio. I wouldn't be shocked to find out that most js devs still consider using import or await the future.

You could say that js improved a lot, that it was way worse beforr. But I hate chaining now, and i hated back then!

On top of this, you have these blog web companies, sucking the "js tutorial" business tit dry, pumping out the most obscenely unprofessional and bar lowering tutorials you can imagine, further capping the average intelligence of most js devs.

And abusing SEO while they're at it, littering the entire web with copy paste content.

This happened with one of our senior profs during the first year of my college. I wouldn't call him a dev if my life depended on calling him a dev but regardless, I narrate the story here.

We were "taught" C++ by some really dumb professors during our first year of college and it was mandatory that everyone cleared the subject regardless of what field of engineering the students chose. Having already done 2 years of C++, it was quite a breeze for me. But during the final lab exam, one of my friends requested my help in solving the quite tough question (for those beginners). Thinking the exam and teaching was unfair, I stupidly wrote the answer on a piece of paper and passed it to him. One of our teachers, who had seen him ask me, was lying low waiting to catch me in the act and she swooped in and busted our asses kicking us out of the exam hall and sending us to the HoDs office like some prize from her war against academic corruption.
In the end, I failed the exam for cheating and had to redo (not only the exam but the entire lab course).

When I returned to college during the summer vacations to redo the course, I first met the antagonist of our story. Having a huge head that looked like a deformed watermelon and an ego the size of a building, he assaulted us first with a verbal diarrhoea of his achievements as a CS professor. I quickly realised that I was in a class of people who had failed to grasp how to make a program that printed "Hello World". To make things shorter, every question the prof gave us, I managed to solve in a mere matter of minutes, several better than his own solutions. Not having expected a student who knew his shit, he was determined to play me down. He hurled tougher question at me and I knocked them over his enormous head piercing his ego. He asked me such questions as how to reverse 1000 and get 0001 and wasn't satisfied with the several ways I gave because none of it were what he had in mind (which turned out to be storing them in a fucking array and printing them in reverse. That's printing not reversing you dung beetle). I kept my calm throughout but on the day of the final exam, he set quite a tough paper for a class of people who had already failed once. To his utter shock and dismay, I aced that too and I produced flawless code. This man who has an MTech from one of the most reputed colleges of my country then proceeded to tell me that he had to cut my marks because I had used more than one function when the question had asked for one function ( it never said only one). I lost my shit and pointed out that since I was the programmer, it was my wish how I coded. I also explained to him how repeating code is a bad practice and one should use functions to reduce redundancy and keep the code clean. Nevertheless, he lost his shit and he threatened me with consequences as apparently "I didn't know who I was messing with". I handed over the paper and stormed out of the class (though he called me back and tried to argue more with me. I apologized for losing my shit and left when he was done talking). I ended up getting a 'C'. Totally worth it.

PHP arrays.

The built-in array is also an hashmap. Actually, it's always a hashmap, but you can append to it without specifying indexes and PHP will use consecutive integers. Its performance characteristics? Who knows. Oh, and only strings, ints and null are valid keys.

What's the iteration order for arrays if you use them as hashmaps (string keys)? Well, they have their internal order. So it's actually an ordered hashmap that's being called an array. And you can produce an array which has only integer keys starting with 0, but with non-sequential internal (iteration) order.

This array weirdness has some non-trivial implications. `json_encode` (serializes argument to JSON) assumes an array corresponds to a JSON array if its keys are consecutive integers in increasing order starting with 0, otherwise the array becomes a JSON object. `array_filter` (filters arrays/hashmaps using callback predicate) preserves keys, so it will punch holes in the int key sequence if non-last items are removed, thus turning arrays into hashmaps and changing your JSON structure if you forget to discard keys before serialization.

You may wonder how JSON deserialization works, then? There's a special class for deserialized JSON objects, `stdClass`. It's basically a hashmap too, but it's an object, not an array, and all functions that would normally accept arrays won't work with it. So basically its only use is JSON (de)serialization. You can even cast arrays to objects, producing `stdClass`.

Bonus PHP trivia:

Many functions return nonsensical values. `preg_match`, the regex matching function, returns 1 for success, 0 for no matches and false for malformed regular expression. PHP supports exceptions, so it could just throw one on errors. It would even make more sense to return true, false and null for these three cases. But no, 1, 0 and false. And actual matches are returned by output arg.

`array_walk_recursive`, a function supposed to recursively apply callback to each element of an array. That's what docs say. It actually applies it to leafs only. It will also silently accept object instead of array and "walk" it, but without recursing into deeper objects.

Runtime type enforcing is supported for function arguments and returned values. You can use scalar types, classes, array, null and a few special keywords. There's also a `mixed` keyword, which is used in docs and means "anything". It's syntactically valid, the parser will accept it, but it matches no values in runtime. Calling such function will always cause a runtime error.

Strings can be indexed with negative integers. Arrays can't.

ReflectionClass::newInstanceWithoutConstructor: "Creates a new class instance without invoking the constructor". This one needs no commentary.

`array_map` is pretty self-explanatory if you call it with a callback and an array. Or if you provide more arrays of equal length via varargs, callback will be called with more arguments, one from each array. Makes sense so far. Now, you can also call `array_map` with null instead of callback. In that case it treats provided arrays as rows of a matrix and returns that matrix, transposed.

If you didn't think NodeJS dependency hell was that bad, you should try sequentially parsing a graph that's stored as an array of nodes and their references, where processing of said nodes forces you to use some async functions that depend on other async functions.

What should have been 20 lines of code written in 30 minutes has turned into 3 hours of horror, reading about babel, realizing that it's just adding more problems without solving one, assessing the effort of modification of async libraries to include sync methods as well, trying out asyncwait, async, and everything else there is, trying to rethink the recursive algorithm, rewriting it several times, cursing and hating myself for not choosing to use Python or .NET Core, screaming senselessly at my wife in a language as familiar to her as Klingon, crying in the bathroom, re-assessing my life choices, thinking whether it was a mistake to dedicate 10 years to this career, maybe I'm just not cut out for it since I can't handle this simple task, watching noose tying tutorials on youtube, thinking about my naked empty RPI that won't connect to the server any time soon.

Seriously. Why is it SO BAD?! Or is it just me?

Don't hire monkeys that write shitty code that cause production issues.

Just spent the entire morning with our global team (10+ ppl) looking into the cause of a production issue.

Root cause: shitty code that anyone that has read an algorithm book (array resizing costs) and understanding how DB functions should be used and why (bulk inserts vs one at a time) would never write.

Even the code itself is a mess...

I just love languages and functions that support using a negative int to access array from the end! Awesome.

!rant
Warning : This rant is long and is a rant asking for help and suggestions. If you will read and dont leave any comments, please go search other rants. Thanks.
-----------------------------------
Hi, fellow ranters. In our community, we have a tech class where teens (teens here mean 14yo -15yo) come to learn computer stuffs. Teens here are selected by a test and an interview. There are some teens who are f***ing awesome. One of them are proficient in scratch. (yeah, the orange cat) Another is awesome at PhotoShop, and the other loves windows xp. The teacher uses Microsoft Visual C++ IDE made in the 1990s. The kid sitting to my left made flappy bird with gamemaker. About 10 to 11 teens doesnt know what ctrl+alt+del does in windows and never did programming before... 3 among them always brings coke and oreos and eats super loudly. CRACK! And I bet no one knows about git.
Ok. Enough for the awesome teens. Now what we learn.
We learn C! Yes, C. We learned for, if else, switch and all those stuffs, then learned variables, which made other students who never did programming before be (―,.―).
Next class we will learn about functions in 3 hours. Then array and pointer in 3 hours. Thats it for c programming. Then we do some unnecessary stuffs and time for the finals.
We need to make a project with up to 4 teens as one team. Now I am asking you awesome ranters to suggest some projects for about 4 pros and 16 noobs can do. 10 hours are given in class and we can do in other times by ourselves in home. What should we do? I bet many of them will say to make ascii art in c which is dull and I have no thoughts of doing that.
Any thoughts will be appreciated.
Thank you for reading.
To see my skills, go to my profile page.
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I had the oppertunity to join a non profit organization to help them automate stuff instead of serving the army. One of their core applications got rewritten like a year ago from a terrible and very old Symfony stack to Laravel / React.

The guys who were in charge for the rewrite didn't really adapt the mindset of either MVC for Laravel nor the component idea behind React. There are a few controllers in the backend, but they sometimes have functions defined which would clearly belong in a model or service class. They rarely defined relationships on models, instead they're joining the tables together for the same effect. The frontend rendering mostly happens in for loops over the returned array from the API instead of breaking things down into little components. This ends in components which have sometimes over 1000 lines with super-nested logic in it.

But I did find my favorite piece of code today in of the controllers. Some many questions ...

Ecma International, the organization in charge of managing the ECMAScript standard, has published the most recent version of the JavaScript language. ECMAScript 2016 (ES7 or JavaScript 7th Edition in the old naming scheme) comes with very few new features. The most important is that JavaScript developers will finally get a "raise to the power" operator, which was mysteriously left out of the standard for 20 years. The operator is **... It will also become much easier to search for data in a JavaScript array with Array.prototype.includes(), but support for async functions (initially announced for ES2016), has been deferred until next year's release. "From now on, expect smaller changelogs from the ECMAScript team," reports Softpedia, "since this was the plan set out last year. Fewer breaking changes means more time to migrate code, instead of having to rewrite entire applications, as developers did when the mammoth ES6 release came out last year."

Picked up an older project which is in prod for 2 years now. I got a DB error related to a null in an array.
Proceed to check the front end(angular 1.5). Ended up in a 3000 lines file😫
What's worse the array was processed by multiple functions including 'filter' and 'filter2'. Naming conventions ftw😂 I don't know whether to laugh or cry 😂

I work at company that uses Drupal for everything. And i mean EVERYTHING. Our dumb CTO once even wanted us to join tender for flight data collection system... of course it would run on fucking drupal...

Yeah i can see its advantages but it has learning curve the shape of the snail shell and if you want it to do something new you either find module for it or drupal will start crying, shits itself and tell you to go fuck yourself.. also it is full of surprises to make your day as miserable as possible, like you send variable as $content['varname'] to user template and it returns as $user_profile['varname']['value']... and yes user template has $content array for content but why use it for storing content that i want to render.. it is used for other content to render... because in drupal content != content...

I started using laravel for my freelance projects and it took my less than 2 week to get up to speed and start working and is incredible fast to work in... You know.. its fun when you want to just add feature you just code that feature into your app.. and not spend 2 fucking years crawling through retarded preprocess functions...

Whenever i try to suggest we use other frameworks.. "Muh drupal has MODULES".. yeah because drupal is the only thing in universe that has modules.. When client has only need for simple site with simple template why use wordpress and have it done in 2 days when you can use drupal have 10 000 unnecessary DB queries that drupal does on every page load to load page title and make that site in a week.. or why use laravel for e-shop with specific functionality requested by client that would take 2 weeks to add in laravel when you can spend 2 months modifing uber-cart or drupal commerce modules only to hit some Drupal core surprise that wont allow for that feature to be implemented...

*array* in php. As soon as the word "array" is in it's name it's argument order, type and return value are just fucken luck.

I've been working with Node and Typescript for a while now, and I wrote a wide array of very general utility functions. Examples include:
- Array.filter but you also get the residue array, it can also leave holes in both arrays if you want to join them later
- Array zipping and unzipping to and from tuples (especially valuable when you're manipulating the prop set with Object.entries() in a HOC
- Array maximum selection, with an optional mapper
- Cancelable promises, lazy promises, a promise that resolves when a given function on an object is called (excellent for DOM events), a timeout promise.
- A typed event with both immediate and microtask listeners depending on whether you need state guarantees (this idea I took from a Github gist and upgraded it)

I want to put them on NPM so I don't have to write them and their tests again, and so that if I ever think of an improvement it's easier to propagate it. Do you think I should release them as tiny individual packages which would be nice from a versioning standpoint, or should I make them into a compilation which would be a lot less work for me (and therefore would probably result in better documentation and more tests)?

nothing new, just another rant about php...
php, PHP, Php, whatever is written, wherever is piled, I hate this thing, in every stack.

stuff that works only according how php itself is compiled, globals superglobals and turbo-globals everywhere, == is not transitive, comparisons are non-deterministic, ?: is freaking left associative, utility functions that returns sometimes -1, sometimes null, sometimes are void, each with different style of usage and naming, lowercase/under_score/camelCase/PascalCase, numbers are 32bit on 32bit cpus and 64bit on 64bit cpus, a ton of silent failing stuff that doesn't warn you, references are actually aliases, nothing has a determined type except references, abuse of mega-global static vars and funcs, you can cast to int in a language where int doesn't even exists, 25236 ways to import/require/include for every different subcase, @ operator, :: parsed to T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM for no reason in stack traces, you don't know who can throw stuff, fatal errors are sometimes catchable according to nobody knows, closed-over vars are passed as functions unless you use &, functions calls that don't match args signature don't fail, classes are not object and you can refer them only by string name, builtin underlying types cannot be wrapped, subclasses can't override parents' private methods, no overload for equality or ordering, -1 is a valid index for array and doesn't fail, funcs are not data nor objects when clojures instead are objects, there's no way to distinguish between a random string and a function 'reference', php.ini, documentation with comments and flame wars on the side, becomes case sensitive/insensitive according to the filesystem when line break instead is determined according to php.ini, it's freaking sloooooow...

enough. i'm tired of this crap.
it's almost weekend! 🍻

If I kept track of all the hours wasted on issues due to overloads of functions called ToList() it would probably make up a sizable portion of the project budgets.

If I call ToList on a query object, it looks like I'm trying to serialize the query definition into some kind of array. That's what it *should* do with that name. Bonus if the object implements some generic enumerable interface, ToList makes it call your database, you can just toss the query into some json serializer that blocks while calling ToList for you, and people end up doing exactly this because the code turned out so much neater.

Because that's the thing. It's like people implement it because it's "neat" and the user shouldn't care about its internals. How many tears would be shed by just calling it ExecuteAsync?

I'm currently writing a discord bot using the discord.py library and I cannot decide how to structure my code.
I was thinking of writing it in modules, with a core script that would load any valid module class that would include an array of all the event hooks it wanted, whether it wanted to send messages and so on.

It's a nice way to practice python after my last working bot that I wrote in (Sit down for this) PHP using an outdated and abandoned wrapper (Yeah, event-based programming in PHP, I know)

Are there any better ways to do this? I really don't want to hardcode all the functions in, only to have it fall apart later after adding another feature...

pr();

I use this in all my project now...

It was the first time I've felt really daft that I'd been hand coding:

<pre>
<?php print_r($array); ?>
</pre>

Needless to say I now have a big collection of beautiful little functions!

Fun fact about JavaScript: it's a... bit inconsistent. For example, functions like Array.map, Array.reduce, Array.sort don't mutate the array, but Array.unshift does, and returns array's length after the element was added.

When I copy some lines of my source code into other functions but getting desperated when compiler says something like "...'Double' but 'Array' was expected" because I forgot to change the value for the functions.