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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 23rd, 2023

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  • Not my experience. I’ve had the displeasure of having to use Rider at work, and it’s much slower than VSCode, if only for boot times which are a pain in the butt for large projects. You gotta pay for that bloat and feature creep somehow.

    And that’s on a Xeon machine.

    As for refactoring, yes, Rider has lots of options that don’t work and do half the job. So much so, that I don’t use them at all, because they’re unreliable.

    The requirement for Copilot to qualify an IDE is a bit funny. First, VSCode has some support for it, and, secondly, this is super recent, so unless IDEs didn’t exist since last year, I’d say this is not core to the definition of IDE.




  • If higher-ups complain about intempestive code refactoring, it’s always a good idea to stop for a moment and to start becoming less trigger-happy with refactors. It’s OK to take some time to determine what actual value refactors bring to the project in tangible terms - intuition is not enough. Convincing a critical manager is a good start, because their tolerance for programmer bullshit is low if they don’t actually write code.

    Very often, and this is especially prevalent among junior programmers who care about what they do, the reasoning for refactoring turns out to be something along the lines of “I don’t like this” or “I read some cool blog article saying things should be done that way”, without any care about whether or not the change in question is actually improving anything, or, if it does, if the improvement is worth the degradation in terms of quality (new bugs)/maintainability (added genericity making the code more difficult to understand, cryptic features of the language being used that make it hard to understand what’s going on, I’m sure there’s other examples…)


  • The problem is you often get in cases where the developer cannot back their intuition that something is actually harmful with facts. When it’s not just pure bikeshedding about code they don’t like and falsely claim to be a ticking timebomb, they fail to weigh the risks of leaving slightly offputting code in the codebase against the risks associated with significant code changes in general, which, even with tests, will still inevitably break.

    Developers of all sorts tend to vastly overestimate how dangerous a piece of code may be.

    To be clear, while I’ve seen it with other developers, I’m still guilty of this myself to this day. I’m not saying I’m any better than anybody.

    It’s just that I’ve seen how disruptive refactoring can be, and, while it is often necessary, I thought it would be important to mention that I think it should be done with care.

    If you can convince a manager with rational arguments in terms of product quality, it can be a good way to make the case for a refactor, because your manager probably won’t be impressed by arguments about unimportant nuances we developers obsess about.





  • Six levels of abstractions, sure, if you have that many, you may want 6 functions. But that contradicts Martin when he’s saying that there should be one line in an if, and everything more should be promoted to its own function. There’s no way a programmer routinely writes code so terse that you get six levels of abstraction in a dozen of lines of code. Otherwise, Martin doesn’t understand what an abstraction is.

    Managing a stack in your head like a computer is very challenging as far as cognitive load is concerned. You don’t want to jump all over the place. Otherwise, when you reach your destination, you end up forgetting what got you here in the first place.

    This form of code fragmentation makes debugging an absolute nightmare, and finding sources of mutation absurdly frustrating. Good tooling can help you track where a variable is used and in which order mutations happen trivially in code in a single function. It’s not as as helpful when it’s spread all over the place. You can infer so much less statically if you follow Martin’s advice.

    I’m not advocating for 1000-lines functions here, mind you. When functions become too big, other challenges arise. What’s necessary is balance, which Martin’s book fails to teach.


  • It’s inspired so many crimes against engineering as a whole that it’s OK to discourage people from reading it. Not only is it pointless, but it’s also actively harmful to the industry as a whole.

    When something is mostly garbage and good advice is so sparse in it, there’s no need to hold onto it. It’s as much of a mixed bag as a turd with a nice ribbon is a mixed bag of prettiness.

    Burn it with napalm.

    … Nah, I don’t actually mean it should be burnt, that was a joke. The book is a nice reminder that, on top of being a bigot, Robert Martin (not my uncle) should not be hired to write any kind of code in any professional capacity.



  • I know it is, and I find it to be a pretty ridiculously complex fix for a self-inflicted wound.

    The disruption it’s caused me outweighs by far any minor inconvenience with the multiplication or micro packages in the NodeJS world. There’s that, and the Python 2 vs 3 shitshow from which the world still hasn’t fully recovered from yet.

    I mean it: Python has no business laughing at Javascript. Get your act together, snek 😜


  • Python has other stupid problems related to pip. As much as stupid micro-dependencies suck in Javascript, they’re not the shitshow managing dependencies in Python is. It’s an inefficiency that never actually caused me noticeable issues in my former webdev life.

    And let’s not talk about C++… People reinvent all sorts of wheels all the time because sharing anything is so annoying.


  • On top of being super bloated, Intellij’s Rider is far from “just working” in my experience. Not only is it super slow to boot, but it also changes asmdefs in my Unity project unprompted, in a way that prevents my project from working (creates cyclic dependencies). The debugger also sometimes doesn’t trigger breakpoints 😵‍💫

    I absolutely despise it, viscerally.