Programming

Man, I used to really like browsing the stuff at ThinkGeek. Even bought a few things. Now that it's owned by... I wanna say GameStop?... it's ceased to be interesting to me. I liked things like the laundry basket that looked like a radioactive barrel, the shower gel that looks like a blood bag... that kind of light-hearted novelty stuff. But the new owner just gutted all the interesting content, and it's just all IP collectables now.

It's been long enough I forgot bout ThinkGeek. Damn. Wish something like it were still around.

Back in 2014, "he" was still considered by many to double up as a gender neutral singular pronoun (which was the standard in English for at least a century). The rehabilitation of "they" as a gender neutral singular is very, very recent. I had to be actively taught not to use it that way back in the late '80s.

This, of course, was the proscriptivist position. Kids who "don't know any better" have always used a gender neutral singular "they" until their teachers told them not to.

Very much sounds like a tech bro wrote it. A lot of these are simply in the wrong place. I feel being "eager to fix what isn't broken" is a terrible trait on most projects that need to ship. Or at least, terrible if you go forward with trying to fix something that isn't broken without looping in production first. You have a schedule to keep so if it works, continue forward. The whole article reeks of perfection being the end goal rather than good enough. Every usable technology out there is built off of good enough being the goal. I've yet to see a piece of software that shipped with perfection being the goal and actually hitting that goal. More so when you lose that sight of good enough you stop making adjustments to fix things quickly. "Well this button doesn't work the third time you click it really fast" "Well that's because our button interface has a specific pop back-up animation delay and we'll need to rewrite the whole button system interface to become clickable again only after the button pops back up. So let's put that as the only answer on Jira, slate it will take 3 months, and ignore you could just clear the delay if the button is clicked again as a workaround."

Second worst, after me

@upstream using a mixture of tabs and spaces

Yeah I don't agree with "bulldozer code" bit. Splitting a long function into smaller parts doesn't have to be about reuse. It's useful to do it for clarity. As a single function grows, the number of local variable often grows as well and eventually you end up juggling tons of variables and the slightest change ripples three hundred lines further down. Break it down into a handful of steps with a number of arguments you can count on your fingers and it suddenly becomes so simple. Same about deep nesting of loops/conditions.

Rule of thumb is a function needs to fit in my head - so if I stick my face on the screen and the function's code can still be partly seen, it's time to break it down.

On the flip side I work with people who have been doing it for 20+ years and are "bad" programmers.