Python. Changed a function to return a tuple instead of one value in some database code. Tests pass, gets deployed, everything works. End of the month comes. Suddenly, we get a report that we're draining people's bank accounts and credit cards.

It turns out there was an untested bit of code inside the billing process that used this function. It used the function that was changed. To make matters worse, when the exception was thrown, the billing had already completed successfully, and due to another unrelated bug it would retry despite this.

So, needless to say, type safety and good unit tests are things I prioritize nowadays.

Languages without a fully implemented type system.

Granted, it has been a fad for a quarter century, but everything points at one simple fact: Types matter in programming.

In dynamic languages, you tend to see that testing suites explode into thousands of tests, many of which wouldn't even be necessary if you had some type safety.

You see that languages like JS are forked into more typesafe dialects, like Typescript. Python got typehints since 3.6, and PHP added typehints for methods, then typehints for properties, and will soon even have compound types.

Maybe most languages will never reach the level of Haskell or Scala, and that's totally fine, but I think the direction languages are moving in is pretty much set in stone: No ambiguity, more safety. Code should fail before deploying, not after.

Seriously, wtf is with the new "make-everything-in-javascript" thing?

JavaScript is a terrible language. The type safety, or rather lack of it, gives me nightmares about debugging. The standards are always different. It's way too flexible. Ugh.

I'm tired of all the awesome services that I'd love to use being centralized over Node and JS. I don't want to use your stupid fucking language. Who does?

Also what happened to that dart thing that was supposed to replace JS?

Code review time:

Hey Rudy, can you approve my PR? ??? Shouldn't it be can you review my PR?(thought to myself)
Anyway, as a new practice, we(royal we) do not approve PRs with js files. If we touch one, we convert it to typescript as part of a ramp up to a migration that never seems to get here. But I digress.
I look at the laziest conversion in history.

Looked like
Import 'something';
Import 'somethingElse';
Import 'anotherSomething';

export class SomeClass {
public prop1: any;
public prop2: any;
public prop3: any;

public doWork(param: any){
let someValue = param;
// you get the idea
return someValue;
}
}

Anyway, I question if all the properties need to be visible outside of the class since everything was public.
Then if the dev could go and use type safety.
Then asked why not define the return type for the method since it would make it easier for others to consume.
Since parts of the app are still in js, I asked that they check that that the value passed in was valid(no compilation error, obviously).
Also to use = () => {} to make sure "this" is really this.
I also pointed out the import problem, but anyway.

I then see the his team leader approve the PR and then tell me that I'm being too hard on his devs. ????

Do we need to finish every PR comment with "pretty please" now?
These are grown men and women, and yet, it feels oddly like kindergarten.

I've written code in the past that wasn't pretty and I received "WTF?" as a PR comment. I then realized I ate sh*t on that line of code, corrected it and pushed the code. Then we went to Starbucks.
I'm not that old(35), but these young devs need to learn that COMPILERS DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS!!!!!
Ahhhhhh
Much better.
Thanks for the platform.

I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.

Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.

More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.

So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.

Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.

Holy shit. I just watched a video on Rust and I think I am in love.

Tracked mutability, reference counting, guaranteed thread safety, all in a compiled type-safe language with the performance of C++? 😍

Why did I not check this out sooner??

Biggest annoyance of favorite language:

Python has no static type checking. I know that is not something that is intended for Python. It's just that I enjoy the syntax, but would love the type-safety of something like Kotlin/Java

There's very little good use cases for mongo, change my mind.

Prototyping maybe? Rails can prototype, create/update/destroy db schemas really quickly anyways.

If you're doing a web app, there's tons of libs that let you have a store in your app, even a fake mongo on the browser.

Are the reads fast? When I need that, use with redis.

Can it be an actual replacement for an app's db? No. Safety mechanisms that relational dbs have are pretty much must haves for a production level app.
Data type checks, null checks, foreign key checks, query checks.
All this robustness, this safety is something critical to maintain the data of an app sane.

Screw ups in the app layer affecting the data are a lot less visible and don't get noticed immediately (things like this can happen with relational dbs but are a lot less likely)

Let's not even get into mutating structures. Once you pick a structure with mongo, you're pretty much set.
Redoing a structure is manual, and you better have checks afterwards.

But at the same time, this is kind of a pro for mongo, since if there's variable data, as in some fields that are not always present, you don't need to create column for them, they just go into the data.

But you can have json columns in postgres too!

Is it easier to migrate than relational dbs? yes, but docker makes everything easy also.

I mean JavaScript is all cool and everything, but without type safety, it becomes gigantic pain in my ass :'(

Is there anybody who feels the same? :(

Working with a SOAP endpoint. I know it is some .NET server due to the style of stacktrace on exceptions. Nice, a framework where I can expect some type safety granted by static types. I build some xsl to transform the SOAP wsdl files into classes and structs to interact with the endpoint. Works out perfectly.

Plottwist!

Elements which are defined in the xsd/wsdl with maxOccur=unbounded and minOccur=0 should represent a simple collection of this type. Therefore does my implementation expect a collection of this type. But no. The shipped SOAP client in my stack ignores the definition and simply deserializes the SOAP response into T and not a collection of T.

Where the duck are the types when they are defined all over the place?

How did they manage to come up with such a bug? The only things there should be numbers or an arrow, not meaningless Hebrew letters.

I like rants that are thought provoking and push a message forward regardless of whether they may sting a little, so for my first post on here I'd like to hit at home with many of you.
Html5 "Native" Applications are not needed. Let's cover mobile first of all, the misconception that apps are written in either javascript or Native android/ Native ios environment. Or even some third party paid tools like xamarin is quite strange to me. OpenGL ES is on both IOS and Android there is no difference. It's quite easy to write once run everywhere but with native performance and not having to jump through js when it's not needed. Personally I never want to see html or css if I'm working on a mobile app or desktop. Which brings me to desktop, I can't begin to describe how unthought out an electron app is. Memory usage, storage space for embedding chromium, web views gained at the expense of literally everything else, cross platform desktop development has been around for decades, openGL is everywhere enough said. Finally what about targeting browser if your writing a native app for mobile and desktop let's say in c++ and it's not in javascript how can it turn back into javascript, well luckily c++ has emscripten which does that simply put, or you could be using a cross complier language like haxe which is what I use. It benefits with type safety, while exporting both c++ and javascript code. Conclusion in reality I see the appeal to the js ecosystem it's large filled with big companies trying to make js cross development stronger every day. However development in my mind should be a series of choices, choices that are invisible don't help anyone, regardless of the popularity of the choice, or the skill required.

My visceral hate of Spring.Net burns with the force of a thousand suns.

Almost everything it does is done wrong or solved better by other solutions.

Specifying which classes to instantiate from .xml files? Sure why not, compile type safety (the whole reason for using a static programming language) is obviously overrated and dependency based injection is surely impossible!
And for extra bonus points, now our client code must be aware of the internals of the service classes, and all of their references as well, because, encapsulation? Who cares.

Have you made an typo? Good fucking luck finding out from which of the 100 config files we have floating around...

And, because it has baked in AOP and Transactions its woven into the fabric of the project like a tapewom.

Of course this may just be how our "special snowflake" project uses Spring.

What makes it more painful is that I love good DI tools (ninject, castlewindsor, autofac, there are so many...) and we're stuck with this turd because 7 years ago some java devs couldn't be arsed to learn a new library...

I have become very fond of React, but the pushback I've experienced when suggesting typescript is crazy.
I think this is the reason why so many enterprise apps are written in Angular. Type safety isn’t a crutch, it's a tool. Plus, interfaces are a dev time construct, and will not bloat the codebase since it doesn’t transpile into js.
But Ts also gives us a lot of other goodies that allow for cleaner design patterns and a better adoption of oop principals.
Also, generics/constructor types, whatever you wanna call it, are your friends. An Array<SomeEntity> or SomeEntity[] will give you peace of mind I’m so many scenarios.
Anyway, I have bitched enough.
Rant over.
Have a wonderful Christmas, everyone.
Ps. This isn’t aimed at anyone in particular, but a the react community as a collective. :)

I'm writing a minor productivity app which consumes and modifies a vbscript file on a network drive which apparently gets included in other productivity tools to drive the business, as well as updates the relevant DNS entry the field is associated with, and because I care about making the world a better place now writes the data out to what I hope becomes the authoritative source for said data which eventually replaces these who-the-knows-why-they-are-there network drive files and snippets.

The tool removes the need for an ISP tech in the field to make TWO phone calls when they update network equipment. One for the vbscript tweak, one for the DNS update.

Oh, did I mention that some PHP app under a L1 helpdesk guy's desk that the company has made absolutely necessary for their business (and I subsequently moved to a god damn server) consumes the vbscript file and parses it into something PHP can understand?

You can't make this shit up.

The only saving grace is that I have my team rewriting all of this ridiculous shit in Haskell. Type safety and long term refatorability will keep us sane.

Our lead dev has convinced the board to move the new software suite forward into .Net Core 3. Much of his reasoning is sound, a mainstay of which is the cost and ease of hiring developers to actually make and maintain it.

My own roadmap with the company focuses around one of these products, so I am to become the core developer and maintainer. Given thats the case, given that my primary skill is with Javascript/Node and given that we have deadlines, I am going to make the case today that this product might be better built in Node.

We are going for a microservices architecture. Combined with Typescript for type safety as the code base gets bigger, I am not sure I can think of many real advantages to choosing .NET instead. It will benefit from its async I/O later too, as the plan is to build in API driven dynamic UI down the road.

He is a fierce man, and I am the junior. Wish me luck.

Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.

So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.

2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.

So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?

Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)

3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?

4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot