sunwukung

This suggests governments need to commission infrastructure level dependencies directly rather than relying solely on the market and consumer behaviour, particularly given the poor outcomes in areas where there is little to no competition

I fully concur, we've automated away the enjoyable and creative part of the job. I used Windsurf for a project recently, and while it was impressive, I don't feel I was notably more efficient at delivery. I often had to intercede to refactor what it had churned out to make the solution legible. My takeaway was that AI coding is a fairly joyless experience, you're effectively writing JIRA tickets for it, and the labour switches to coaching and PRs. It feels like we're just accelerating the speed at which we build legacy code bases, which no-one will understand.

I've been following some kid on TikTok who started last year on this journey - and it's been truly frustrating to watch. I tried to discourage them from leaning so heavily on AI, but they insisted it was a different way of learning. A year later, and they still don't comprehend for loops or conditional blocks, and believe that comprehending this basic material is a deep understanding of code.

Do you equate freedom of speech with "abuse, harassment, and harm"? Were these activities you wanted to perform in order to sign up?

this - this is the reason. Large functions accrue state and state begets bugs over time.

I'm very dubious of anyone resorting to "readability" as a justification.

What you're doing by breaking things into functions is trying to prevent it's eventual growth into a bug infested behemoth. In my experience, nearly every case where an area of a code base has become unmaintainable - it generally originates in a large, stateful piece of code that started in this fashion.

Every one who works in said area then usually has the option of either a) making it worse by adding another block to tweak it's behaviour, or b) start splitting it up and hope they don't break stuff.

I don't want to see the "how" every time I need to understand the "what". In fact, that is going to force me to parse extraneous detail, possibly for hundreds of lines, until I find the bit that actually needs to be changed.

As stated elsewhere, if you're using a component based UI, this isn't a problem. You're also free to mix regular CSS with Tailwind.

As for the "git gud" school of CSS, should we also abandon React, Svelte and the like and revert to hand-cranking DOM manipulation like it's 1999...?

Sure, if you're manually editing a large volume of .html by hand, Tailwind is bad news, but given the plethora of static site builders out there (brief shout out to Astro which is excellent), manually authoring individual .html pages seems like masochism.

I think this is about the level of abstraction. As React component extraction is to tag soup, so named functions composed are to fp primitives. In code reviews, if I see a big swamp of pipe/fold/cond etc at the top level, I'd kick it back and ask that to be wrapped in a named function that explains what it does, rather than exposing it's guts.

Writing concise, clear code is a skill that straddles any paradigm.

I think you missed the primer on statistics

I agree! Why would you use OTS tools in any DIY project? I'm going to make my own hammers, nails, drills etc - and anyone who does use store-bought tools probably doesn't know the first thing about building.

Or they just want to get the actual job done and don't see the value in cobbling together a homebrew solution, instead of using a library maintained by skilled devs with excellent documentation, battle tested in thousands of applications with a huge community of users and articles for support.

I used PS and many other 3D graphics apps commercially for over 10 years, Gimp is sadly not a patch on it. UX is a thing, and Gimp doesn't have that. As a now software engineer, I can see the thought process behind the application, but it's workflow is treacherous. I switched out to Affinity a few years ago, because PS became too bloated/heavy, and Gimp just doesn't cut it for real work imho. I mention this because it was easier to pick up Affinity after a couple of hours than wrestling with Gimp. Same goes for Blender Vs Max/Maya. I hate to say this, because I would like these tool to be more accessible to all

not much of a life really is it? That aside, it would make room for the non-livestock animals to live on the planet, reintroduce some biodiversity and create genetic firewalls to stop pandemics going absolutely buckwild.

I'm vegan (plant-based eater is less catchy) - but I started for health reasons tbh. Personally, I don't eat that many substitutes, except for convenience when I haven't got time to cook.

While the suffering argument is entirely valid, it's obviously not a successful driver of change. The climate change/pandemic/health angle is easily more appealing to the average consumer.

Our life expectancy has also grown drastically in the last 100 years - for a variety of reasons, so this is a bit of a blunt instrument

I think this in turn is a symptom of conflating rendering with state management in the first place.

The line between React and vanilla code is blurring more every day - which is a bit greedy for something that's purely meant to be a rendering solution. I would personally advocate to push React as far away from my app code as possible, and instead implement a specialised container class that hooks into React's internals (Controller? Model?) purely to handle localised state changes.

The benefits of meditation (and any potential problems) do not result in permanent physiological changes. It's like makeup that purports to reduce the signs of aging - it only works if you keep applying it.

similar growing disenchantment with Backbone. Minor gripe re: Angular - if you're working with a server side templating language (i.e. Flask/Jinja) you have to configure it to use alternative tags, which could cause problems if working with any 3rd party libs.