• 1 Post
  • 842 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: September 24th, 2023

help-circle







  • Python is one of the worst offenders here. I don’t think Python’s poor behaviour should excuse Lua’s.

    But I can also see why Python is making breaking changes - a lot of Python is so bad it really makes sense to clean it up. I dunno if Lua is in that situation.

    Anyway I think I would look to other languages like Go, Rust, Java, C++ which do a much better job. I don’t think Go or Rust have any backwards incompatibilities (at least very very few) and C++ has a small number but they’re for stuff that is truly ancient or almost completely unused. It’s totally possible if you care about it.











  • I’ve never seen a good answer to this question. Snapshot testing sucks. A 0.3% threshold can totally be too low for benign changes and too high to detect real bugs.

    Manual testing is probably the best option if you can afford it, but it’s time consuming and tedious.

    I’m sure there are people working on AI for this. I wouldn’t be too surprised if that’s the best option but I haven’t looked into any of that. Also you really want it to be deterministic and I’m not sure how you do that with AI easily.



  • I think the use of the term junior and senior is a bit confusing because it conflates age and skill. I would say most people use it to talk about skill, because we’re talking job titles here.

    While age and skill are certainly linked, I have known several junior engineers well over 50 (don’t hire these people!), and also some extremely skilled engineers in their very early 20s. The latter hadn’t yet earned the “senior” job title but that’s just because they didn’t know they deserved it yet.

    So yeah I do think junior (skill) programmers are pretty screwed - AI is already at least on par with the junior skill level people I’ve worked with. But I don’t think that means young people are screwed, as long as you are good at your job.

    For now anyway. Who knows how good AI will be in 5 years. We might all be out of a job.