Is he right? ( Confessions of a Terrible Programmer ) | Hacker News Reader

Is he right? ( Confessions of a Terrible Programmer )

kickin-the-darkness.blogspot.com

32 pointsvlad20 comments

"If I get to pick the programming language for a particular program, my "go to" language is Ada."

Your "go to" is considered harmful.

This one is very good... I found the only way to get higher in life, in profession, in anything, is to acknowledge the own limitations. Whenever the time comes that you start feeling you are really good, you are getting worse instead: as to be really good, you need to get even better, and you can only do that if you are humble enough to recognize your own leaks.

And it doesn't care if you are Einstein or Mozart... the battle for skills isn't against other people, but against nature. Einstein needed to get always better to understand more of the nature, and the same for Mozart and his music.

At least, that's the way I see it.

Sorry for my primitive English :)

BTW, it's one of the most useful tricks in philosophy to always mime the ignorant (which is, absolutely speaking, always more true than the opposite...).

It's the trick to grow in wisdom every time you discuss with any other person.

Whoa. Staring at that site's text for a couple minutes then switching back to News.YC produces an interesting series of horizontal lines.

I was going to say the EXACT same thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage

Bright on dark really strains my eyes... at least when I'm not in a dark room.

Super+M is one of the best key combos in Beryl / Compiz. It inverts all of the colors in the window manager, which is great for turning white on black web pages into black on white.

Just the opposite for me... I really prefer light on dark, because I prefer to not be staring into a lightbulb.

I like light on dark, as you say, but not bright on dark, as whacked said. Light gray or grayish blue / green on on black or dark, dark red is my preferred. I keep a .txt on my desktop with html in it to make font exactly how I like it. On sites that have bad colors, I just paste the text in between the innermost tags in the .txt, save as 'blah.html', and read at ease. :)

If you have a mac, ctrl-alt-apple-8.

WHOA!

I'm curious. What did it do?

Inverting all colors. Very useful, sometimes.

I am skeptical about the assertions stuff. I rather write my methods so that they don't blow up if they are being called with wrong data. Throwing an Exception is OK. I can't recall a case where assertions where really necessary. In fact it seems messy to me to write a method but then to add instructions for humans of the form "but don't call it with parameters like that". It should all be in the code, not in the instructions.

i disagree. if my code is being called with incorrect parameters, i WANT it to blow up. if a method silently fixes input data to something it can deal with, then it's hiding a bug that needs to be fixed.

also, assertions are good documentation. they let maintenance programmers a better idea of what's expected at this point.

Yes! If it causes pain, I WANT it to hurt. Has worked pretty well for us for 3 million years. The same for our code.

Mabye I never needed them much because I have mostly been using Java, which has things like NullPointerException. So no need to write an assertion for that special case. By blow up I meant do something bad, not fail in a noisy way. That would be the exception.

Unit tests are the way to separate assertions from your implementation code to avoid messiness.

Assertions are in the code. And they can really be helpful.

It sounds like this guy would like Standard ML and OCaml. Maybe F#?

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