Re:Controversial Programming Opinions (2012)
by voxl on Friday December 04, 2020 @07:11PM
(#25310129)
* 1-based indexing is superior to 0-based indexing.
1-based indexing is a special case of 0-based indexing.
* If you use spaces to indent code, or in any way rely on a fixed width font to "line things up", you have a fundamental misunderstanding.
Fundamental misunderstanding of what? Not having shit PRs on Github?
* Relatedly, the 80 column "rule" is as stupid in code as it would be in prose. Use your aesthetic sense.
Yeah okay true
* Vim and Emacs both have terrible user interfaces, and are an inferior experience to even a normal text editor let alone a decent IDE. Users have Stockholm Syndrome.
Also true
* For beginners, BASIC is great and Python is terrible.
The language for a beginner is irrelevant, the only metric that matters is: Are you enjoying your coding experience? Keeping students coding is all that matters the language is irrelevant.
* There are many languages with a 'mystique', like Lisp and APL. The correlation between 'mystique' and practical utility is inverse.
This is almost a tautology, of course mystique will lead to less practical utility because their is simply less interest, less tooling, and less understanding about how to use the tool.
* Source code should liberally use Unicode symbols.
Someone has never looked at Agda source code before and it shows.
* Sigils to indicate variable type are actually pretty great, especially if enforced by the compiler. (See above regarding BASIC)
1-based indexing is a special case of 0-based indexing.
* If you use spaces to indent code, or in any way rely on a fixed width font to "line things up", you have a fundamental misunderstanding.
Fundamental misunderstanding of what? Not having shit PRs on Github?
* Relatedly, the 80 column "rule" is as stupid in code as it would be in prose. Use your aesthetic sense.
Yeah okay true
* Vim and Emacs both have terrible user interfaces, and are an inferior experience to even a normal text editor let alone a decent IDE. Users have Stockholm Syndrome.
Also true
* For beginners, BASIC is great and Python is terrible.
The language for a beginner is irrelevant, the only metric that matters is: Are you enjoying your coding experience? Keeping students coding is all that matters the language is irrelevant.
* There are many languages with a 'mystique', like Lisp and APL. The correlation between 'mystique' and practical utility is inverse.
This is almost a tautology, of course mystique will lead to less practical utility because their is simply less interest, less tooling, and less understanding about how to use the tool.
* Source code should liberally use Unicode symbols.
Someone has never looked at Agda source code before and it shows.
* Sigils to indicate variable type are actually pretty great, especially if enforced by the compiler. (See above regarding BASIC)
Gross.