Go is like snakes: you’re hatched from an egg and pretty much effective from the get-go. The older you get, the bigger prey you can eat, but otherwise things don’t change much since you were hatched. Your species can thrive in almost any environment, you’re effective, you have all the tools you need straight out of the egg.
Rust is like humans. There’s a huge incubation period, and you’re mostly helpless when you’re born, but the older you get, the more effective you become with the tools nature graced you with. And you, like Thanos, are inevitable, even if it does mean the death of billions.
Python is like beaver. Everyone has an opinion about you: some think you’re cute, some think you’re wierd. You’re perfectly suited to your environment, but things get awkward outside of your natural habitat - you can function, but not as well as when you’re in your comfort zone. And when people encounter you where they’re not expecting, they can be unpeasantly surprised, and you can cause them trouble.
C++ is like platypus. You resemble some other more simple, some might say sane, animal, but developed into a sort of frankenstein monster creature made from a jumble of parts and a stinger that, when it kills someone, comes as a shock. Every part of you serves some purpose, even if it seems tacked-on and out of place.
Then there’s Node. You are everywhere. You are legion. You fill up ecosystems. People try to defend you, claiming that you serve some purpose in the foodchain, but there’s scant evidence. Attempts to eradicate you fail. You often spread deadly disease. You breed, rapidly, persistently, relentlessly. You are widely hated, and yet everwhere.
Edit: typo
In other words, node = mosquitoes or invasive ant species?
I thought roach myself.
Roaches don’t spread nearly as much disease as 'squiters, and IIRC are actually important in some ecosystems.
For sure! I was just thinking of a species that’ll outlive humanity. :D
Feels like jellyfish fits perfectly (if we ignore the whole can’t be on land stuff).
Did I find another Sanderfan in the wild?
Yes you did
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Didn’t it only recently get generics? How was stuff even done before then?
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interface {}- which is the equivalent of C/C++’void *.
Amen. I couldn’t have said it better.
These are excellent.
I need to add Perl.
Perl is a honey bee. You are unassuming and pragmatic. You fill every niche. Your buzzing carries meaning, but only to other bees. In theory, your ecosystem niche is filled by many competing solutions that are more fit to purpose. But somehow we all know in our hearts that if you disappear, all life on the planet will probably die soon after.
May I acquaint you with the Evil Mangler, historically used by GHC to compile Haskell via C. It would go through the assembly gcc generates and rearrange whole blocks and deletes instructions, such as function prologues and epilogues.
Holy shit. This thing sounds insanely awesome, but also quintessentially Perl. Like, the perfect holotype for Perl.
And, damn, but I’m impressed. I’ve seen code that I admired; elegant, inspired, wise code… but the Evil Mangler leaves me in awe.
There is a very strange, and maybe unexpected, cultural overlap between Perl and Haskell: It’s definitely possible to produce write-only Haskell, and once you get good enough writing Haskell it becomes very inviting to do so. It’s generally going to be a tiny bit more robust, probably a bit slower, and do dirty things with syb regexen could never dream of. While Perl will rip a DFA through a html file while hoping for the best, Haskell will respect the tree structure and then bend it into eldritch knots, leaving you with a file that’s like 50 lines of parser combinators (“it works on my files”) and then five lines of completely inscrutable magic doing the actual processing.
So then I guess C is salamander. Also lays eggs and lives by a pool, but doesn’t do anything extra, and is a necessary step before most of the other modern languages.
COBOL is a coelacanth. To everyone’s surprise, they’re still out there. We thought they were an old, very extinct example of a non-terrestrial lobe-finned fish, but they actually hung on in some odd environments. They cause massive indigestion to anyone that has to consume them.
If Node is a mosquito, Javascript itself is another hymenopteran: the yellow jacket wasp. Just as hated, and with a tendency to injure handlers, but widely successful and defended as filling an actual useful role in nature. They build delicate, arguably pretty nests.
I especially enjoyed your COBOL metaphor. Nicely done!
Nobody who has seen a yellow jacket nest in person would argue they’re pretty.
I literally have one in a jar on a shelf, actually. I find it kind of delicate and wispy. The inside parts are uglier, but still very interesting.
Interesting
Node: You fill up
ecosystemshard drives.Node isn’t a language though.
C++ compiler:
Error: missing ‘;’ on line 69
Warning: two statements on same tabulation depth after if without curly brackets on line 123. Are you sure you want this?
Sql errors: there be a syntax error roughly over there I think. Or maybe it’s a semantic error somewhere else I’m not entirely sure. Listen man all I can say is that this one comma there definitely has something to do with it probably, and the error is most certainly either to its left or to its right.
JSON parsers are getting me recently. The error is somewhere on or after row 1, char 1. Maybe.
Possibly it’s a BOM issue, or someone used double quotes typed on a Mac keyboard. Good luck.
I would swap Python with C++. Constantly dealing with stupid runtime errors that could’ve been easily captured during compile time.
Did you forget to rename this one use of the variable at the end of the program? Sucks for you, because I won’t tell you about it until after 30 minutes into the execution.
sure, but thats just outsourcing the problem.
As if that’s a bad thing… it means you’re not locked in with a tool you don’t like and the language itself doesn’t dictate your workflow.
There’s very little benefit and a lot of potential problems in using a single tool for everything.
Yea and C++ is the same thing, you just need to enable all the warnings on clang-tidy
My brother. That’s why you do unit tests.
And lint
👆 definitely linting first 👆
finding errors as you type is even better than finding errors at compile time
But are you even a real programmer if you don’t test in production?
I shouldn’t need to do unit tests for quick one off scripts
What kind of quick one off scripts have large complex scopes where variable renames are difficult to track?
Besides, these days Python has great LSPs and typing features that can even surpass the traditional typed langs
Mostly number crunching and data exploration tasks. Just so I can make informed decisions about the data I got. I do this rarely enough so it hasn’t been worth for me to install all these extra third party support wheels.
It doesn’t need to have large complex scopes. I have the brain of a goldfish. I program because it’s challenging. It’s challenging because I’m bad at it.
Shouldn’t be forgetting for one off scripts either, if that’s the logic you want to go with.
The tool exists, either you do it or you don’t and end up getting an error until the interpreter hits that line. It’s just the nature of being compiled at runtime.
“Ohh, I got all these numbers I want to crunch using numpy or pandas and plot it using matplotlib. Hold on, I just need to write unit tests first.”
Then maybe use an editor with a decent linter and check the problems tab or just red line markers?? I also have those kind of runtime errors sometimes but I take the blame.
Well. Yeah. That’s test-driven development. It’s a very good practice.
TDD only works well if the problem is clearly specified before the first line of code has been written, which is rarely the case when I need Python for something.
So which is then? You want a one off script to just quickly crunch some numbers on a problem you still need to understand? Because that is where it is perfectly normal to get some errors and doodle around. That is the entire point of it.
Or you have a concise concept of what you are going to do, and how and why? Because that is what you do, when you program more than a “one off”.
Either you go to the store with a shopping list and you work through that list or you go browsing and see what comes up. But don’t expect to be as fast and have everything you needed, when you dont write your shopping list at home.
TDD is not appropriate for everything or everyone
What’s that?
/s
You can solve this with git:
git gud
Seriously though, writing a monolith of a function and not testing anything until you run it the first time isn’t the way to go. Even with a compiler you’re only going to catch syntactical and type issues. No compiler in the world is going to tell you you forgot to store your data in the correct variable, although it or a a linter may have helped you realize you weren’t using it anywhere else.
Python was typeless. And it was common to reuse variables with different types of content.
So you at some point never knew what actually is within the variable you are using.
Using typing in python solve 95% of your problems of having runtime errors instead of compile errors
Agreed. Mypy pre-commit hooks are very useful if you’re starting a fresh project. Adding typing to an existing project which reuses variables with different types… We lost weeks to it.
Seriously, in what way does the python interpreter protect you?
It doesn’t. It carries you by having a module for absolutely everything even shooting yourself in the foot.
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Catching some errors is better than catching no errors. No compiler in any language can protect you from all runtime errors either way, but some are better at it than others.
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Yeesh. I mean, perl would tell you about that immediately, I’m just saying… :-P
Yeah, but then you have to use perl
Using perl is not the problem, now trying to read perl code later? That’s the challenge! :-P
I guess as a C# guy I’ve never had to deal with an issue like this. Most of the time the exceptions are pretty easy to diagnose unless it’s in the UI or in some async function.
Rust: “Oh honey you aren’t ready to compile that yet”
I love “unimplemented!”
Or its alias,
todo!()
I think your comment embodies Rust more than any I’ve seen before
C holding a gun: “if you segfault it’s your own fault”
Assembly (Octopus swimming alone since birth): “compiler? what’s a compiler”
If you’re using C++, why not use streams?
Yes, fprintff is a C thing.
Well, that means that it’s also a C++ thing, but streams are an even slicker concept that aren’t a C thing, making higher-level code look nice and shiny - and abstracting away loads of I/O pain points while encapsulating useful features.
C++ streams are ugly in their own right, but C++ preferred practice these days is to treat it as its own language rather than as a C superset. That is, lots of crufty old C stuff still works in C++ for legacy reasons, but using it when you don’t have to is considered inappropriate.
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Yeah, streams are old and crusty and horrific on the inside (don’t ask about the time I implemented a socket layer with streams), but still less clunky than the C standard library (unless you’re really into being a memory Nazi).
*ffprintfff
I wasn’t personally using C++, I was using relatively modern C which has had an homegrown object system added to it.
Then it’s not C++. And probably an even bigger mess.
Use streams, or fmt. fprintf is for C. It’s like people buying a cheap android phone, then going for an iPhone.
I don’t blame you though, C++ carries a lot of baggage. Modern C++ is pretty nice, though, as is Rust.
And there’s haskell compiler
C++ and C compilers are much more friendly now a days
can’t wait to use templates and have the compiler spit out a 120 page autobiography
A quick
-Werror=format -Werror=format-nonliteral -Werror=format-securitywill solve all yourprintfwoes.@stsquad
— Is my program about 1,000 lines complex?
— Yes, sure!
— Here you are my about 1,000 lines of ‘printf(“Hello, World\n”);’.The meme will be completely different after writing a few lines of rust for a week 😹
Why are you using fprintf in C++ anyway?
How does Python at all help? I don’t understand
Cannot agree with compiler part of cpp. Linker errors on the other hand…
