Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "language comparison"
-
If I died, I would have one regret.
I once worked in a code base whose messiness would make an oil spill in the fucking pacific ocean look like spilled milk on the floor in comparison.
Naturally, it had bugs. Oh BOY did it have bugs. Most of them were taken care of well enough. Or about as well as anyone insane enough to work in that code could.
There was just this one bug, which I still (un)fondly call "my bug of 2 years". It. Just. Didn't. Make. Sense.
It was written in JavaScript. Naturally. Which by itself, is the metaphorical programming language equivalent of a pile of horse manure. But this bug. It was the guano icing on top of the horse manure cake which is JavaScript.
I LITERALLY spent 2 years trying to find a solution. I woke up at night, thinking of explanations. I had dreams about fixing the damn thing. And I never did.
On the day I left the job, I had to pass it on to a friend (who hasn't solved the fucker yet either).
I hated that bug with all my heart. But..
Now that I think back, all the books I read, all the docs that I scoured, every non working fix I coded and every failed efforts I made on it, eventually made me a better programmer.
So cherish your bugs and issues. Sometimes, they come, not to hurt you, but to help you grow (unless you use JS, those bugs just wanna fuck you).3 -
Programming Languages are Like Cars:
Assembler: A formula I race car. Very fast but difficult to drive and maintain.
FORTRAN II: A Model T Ford. Once it was the king of the road.
FORTRAN IV: A Model A Ford.
FORTRAN 77: a six-cylinder Ford Fairlane with standard transmission and no seat belts.
COBOL: A delivery van. It's bulky and ugly but it does the work.
BASIC: A second-hand Rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstery. Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You'll ditch it as soon as you can afford a new one.
PL/I: A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two-tone paint job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in the windshield.
C++: A black Firebird, the all macho car. Comes with optional seatbelt (lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler).
ALGOL 60: An Austin Mini. Boy that's a small car.
ALGOL 68: An Aston Martin. An impressive car but not just anyone can drive it.
Pascal: A Volkswagon Beetle. It's small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectual types.
liSP: An electric car. It's simple but slow. Seat belts are not available.
PROLOG/LUCID: Prototype concept cars.
FORTH: A go-cart.
LOGO: A kiddie's replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a working horn.
APL: A double-decker bus. It takes rows and columns of passengers to the same place all at the same time but it drives only in reverse and is instrumented in Greek.
Ada: An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes, and automatic transmission are standard. No other colors or options are available. If it's good enough for generals, it's good enough for you.
Java: All-terrain very slow vehicle.10 -
Why is it that women find C to be more attractive than Java?
Because C doesn’t treat them like objects. -
devops guy: "Shut up, Perl is awesome. It is the best Swiss Army knife language."
I agree. Let us observe the architect in our metaphor, in charge of building our new building, insists on doing it ALL with a Swiss Army knife.
Yes, I agree with your comparison very very much.
(translation... I want to use Docker, a temporary db, and continuous integration. He wants to continue writing and reading tons of shit to a mess of JSON text files all over the place.)2 -
My NDA prevents me of revealing a lot but here we go...
Hi,
during a 2 year hiatus after High School I decided to study CS. Coming from a third world country with no prospect of getting a nice job without breaking my back or getting spit on by overconfident CS geeks who now actually make a living wage there, I decided to study abroad.
I immediately realized what I have been missing... the culture, the people, the happenings,... I have been starved of LIFE
Anyways, I got the language pretty much down, uni is pretty hard but doable and I got the unthinkable... A JOB. I am currently a working student for a year at a multimillion dollar global conglomerate, doing what some may think of as scripting/data tinkering. I get payed more than both my parents combined, which is why they don't know anything... 😂 (yet, gotta ease em into it).
Now I have gotten my contract extended, which shows that I am doing a decent job there, the boss is firm but chill, coworkers are helpful and resourceful.
But what really grinds my gears is that I am mashing code together whilst googling my brain out, but I am not gaining any skill...
Now comes my grievance, the bane of my existence, the evil Morty to my Morty,... GitHub.
In this professional surrounding, where I got handed a $2,5k notebook and a overly huge paycheck, I never use Git (because we have a proprietary, internal, and very transparent alternative (transparent for the higher ups 😬 ))
I always wanted to contribute on GitHub, but I get very intimidated by the projects there and their scopes, people are waaay too knowledgeable in comparison to me and I will most certainly screw something up and embarrass myself. Since I am very self-conscious and awkward I would most probably just delete my profile there and lurk in the shadows again.
I need help, not only for my mental health, but also to expand my skillset and improve myself, since skill is the only thing I can still acquire.
Does anyone know where I should start as a overglorified python script-kiddy who still thinks 1337 is cool and mr Robot is a decent show?
Thanks,
@rn11 -
I'm so done with flutter.
I wanted to give it a little try by rewriting a small android project I wrote a few years back. It brings some nice concepts especially when it comes to UI related programming but that's all I can really compliment it for. It's nothing more than something to play with as it is right now.
Also I think this text will be hidden behind the read more. Did I successfully bait you with that cat?
The things I truly hate about it:
The ide integration makes me wanna use eclipse again. At least most nonsensical error messages disappear after saving the document on eclipse.
.
Wanna generate a new function? Yeah, let me just place it RIGHT INSIDE THIS FUCKING IMPORT STATEMENT
Over at Google: Let's just rename everything from java slightly different and put it in nonsensical context so that you have to learn all of it again. Also why don't we make it so that the code suggestions only suggest things you already imported, so that you have to look up every little piece shit feature.
When it comes to databases, I must say, I had more fun working with PHP and mysql than with sqFUCKlite. Throwing away the Room components for that? What a joke...
I already said what i think about the syntax here an devrant but I'm more than happy to repeat it here:
The syntax looks like someone looked at C#, Java and JavaScript and then decided to vomit the worst parts of it into a programming language. I can't really classify anything original about it. There are clear inspirations, but they are confusingly mashed together with the other languages making this one nuts of a language.
Android SDK documentation is a blessing in comparison to whatever the fuck flutter tries to do.
I don't think I'll want top touch that Google side project again within the next few years, if it hasn't been replaced with a new side project like billiard by then.5 -
When it comes to the idea of programming and magic, or the comparison between software developers/engineers, computer scientists etc as magicians or wizards, nothing brings the idea much more close to hearth than the C programming language.
A while ago I read the R.A Salvatore books concerning Drizzt, the dark elf. I loved the books, have not continued reading them but I remember them vividly. There was one book in which a human magician came about wielding extremely explosive magic, humans were capable of channeling large amounts of it through explosive and unwieldly ends.
This is the same feeling I get from C
Consider:
int items[] = {1, 2, 3};
printf("Third : %i\n", 3[items]);
and fuck me if shit like the above is not dangerous, it makes sense, arrays have the first items of it server as the pointer address to a first element, doing the above operation returns the third element of the array of 3. But holy shit if I don't think this is dangerous and interesting as fuck
there are many more examples I have that I am finding through me fucking around with: language development (compiler, interpreter), kernel programming as well as net sec. C is the most powerful and devastating thing we have in our hands indeed.7 -
Wrote my first programs on my Commodore C64.
First program was a number guessing game where you needed to guess a number between 1 and 100. Shit had 300+ lines because I only new the if clause and the equals comparison.
I was 9.
Later a friend showed me Modula 2 and I was instantly in love with that language.
Real programming then in school (C, C++, µC assembler). -
I'm really tired of all the hype that Python lately gets, mostly by begginers or at most mediors.
I get that a lot of people like it's syntax, but it has just a few use cases where it really shines (like CI scripting or ML). In other cases it always has a much better and much more mature alternative.
As a web developer I would always pick PHP over Python. It has really mature frameworks like Symfony or Laravel which are using PSR standards, well documented and implemented common patterns, option for strict typing and probably most importantly tons of libraries for pretty much everything. For example I could find implementation of payment gate for even the smallest banks in our country, thus saving several days of implementing it myself. And PHP will always humiliate Python in performance. Yet, pretty much every comparison article of those two will state Python as better option for webdev, mostly because it is evident that the person who wrote the article never even tried to do a proper atleast midsized project in PHP, but has ton of experience in Django.
And what exactly is my point? There are two in fact:
1) You should always use the right tools for the job.
2) Even if you could do something doesn't mean you should do it.
In the end of the day I shouldn't really be bothered by people hyping Python, but those fanatics really made me hate the language, even if I would normally consider looking into it.8 -
Hey @allTheNonGermans in here, this really is a word in Germany:
Einfuhrumsatzsteuerberechnungsalgorhytmus6 -
That's gonna be a quick rant about Golang.
Anyone else here frustrated by the fact that you can inline assignment in the if statement, but can't inline the if-else itself?
You can do:
if thing := hey.getThatThing(); thing == theThing {
return 'this'
} else {
return 'that'
}
But can't do:
return 'this' if hey.getTheThing() == theThing else 'that'
Or is it just me using too much Python everyday and connecting that with Go in free time?5 -
Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.
Subject: Pharo
Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.
Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.
Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.
We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny
Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.
Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.
Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.
I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.
I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.
Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.
For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.
Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.
There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.
Guess I really am a simple dude. -
Programmer looking for a new language
I have been a JavaScript developer for a few years now (non professionally) and I really like the language. I mainly program for execution with NodeJS rather than web, because I feel like I get more freedom (e.i. the ability to use a computer file system).
I normally never use other people's libraries and instead either write my own library/ies for the specific task or use an old one. I only ever use someone else’s if I need a quick frame work to test an idea, never for something I will actually use.
I prefer to work object / class orientated.
I have worked on distributed servers with NodeJS before, however trying to distribute a load across one computer across it's multiple threads has proved problematic due to the heavy delays of standard io transfer speeds.
Why do I want to switch?:
•Because JavaScript is not at all created with multithreading in mind, and pretty much any multithreading solution is a bodge and allot of the time it is more efficient to work single threaded.
•Also, I get the sense that JavaScript + NodeJS is not used often in the programming industry comparison to other languages like; ruby, python, and I don't want to get stuck in a nesh language of which would decrease my employment chances heavy.
Side Note: I have been working on a pet project to have a distributed database (made with nodejs), and so far, there are no language specific problems, but I feel like it would be more efficient if I used a programming language designed more to cater for multi threading.5 -
Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.