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Search - "semicolon problems"
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Online tutorial pet peeves
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My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:
1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)
2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)
3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)
4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull
5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video
6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time
7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)
8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed
9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button
10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)14 -
One of my QA friends told me today,
" If I wanna screw you up, I will just have to delete a semicolon in your code, hahahhaahhaha ". <for real>
There are two problems here
1. He's not familiar with the concept of an IDE
2. I use Python
Stop making fucking " ; " jokes in early 2019 >_<
:P
#No hard feeling to the QAs out there9 -
I want to explain to people like ostream (aka aviophille) why JS is a crap language. Because they apparently don't know (lol).
First I want to say that JS is fine for small things like gluing some parts togeter. Like, you know, the exact thing it was intended for when it was invented: scripting.
So why is it bad as a programming language for whole apps or projects?
No type checks (dynamic typing). This is typical for scripting languages and not neccesarily bad for such a language but it's certainly bad for a programming language.
"truthy" everything. It's bad for readability and it's dangerous because you can accidentaly make unwanted behavior.
The existence of == and ===. The rule for many real life JS projects is to always use === to be more safe.
In general: The correct thing should be the default thing. JS violates that.
Automatic semicolon insertion can cause funny surprises.
If semicolons aren't truly optional, then they should not be allowed to be omitted.
No enums. Do I need to say more?
No generics (of course, lol).
Fucked up implicit type conversions that violate the principle of least surprise (you know those from all the memes).
No integer data types (only floating point). BigInt obviously doesn't count.
No value types and no real concept for immutability. "Const" doesn't count because it only makes the reference immutale (see lack of value types). "Freeze" doesn't count since it's a runtime enforcement and therefore pretty useless.
No algebraic types. That one can be forgiven though, because it's only common in the most modern languages.
The need for null AND undefined.
No concept of non-nullability (values that can not be null).
JS embraces the "fail silently" approach, which means that many bugs remain unnoticed and will be a PITA to find and debug.
Some of the problems can and have been adressed with TypeScript, but most of them are unfixable because it would break backward compatibility.
So JS is truly rotten at the core and can not be fixed in principle.
That doesn't mean that I also hate JS devs. I pity your poor souls for having to deal with this abomination of a language.
It's likely that I fogot to mention many other problems with JS, so feel free to extend the list in the comments :)
Marry Christmas!34