I don’t think either is actually true. I know many programmers who can fix a problem once the bug is identified but wouldn’t be able to find it themselves nor would they be able to determine if a bug is exploitable without significant coaching.

Exploit finding is a specific skill set that requires thinking about multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously (or intentionally methodically). I have found that most programmers simply don’t do this.

I think the definition of “good” comes into play here, because the vast majority of programmers need to dependably discover solutions to problems that other people find. Ingenuity and multilevel abstract thinking are not critically important and many of these engineers who reliably fix problems without hand holding are good engineers in my book.

I suppose that it could be argued that finding the source of a bug from a bug report requires detective skills, but even this is mostly guided inspection with modern tooling.

Maybe it depends on how or when you signed up. I never gave a cell number and I can use 3.5.

It depends on what you are trying to do… There are many tunnel / reverse proxy routing services like https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/

Here’s a list https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

You can also get a super cheap vps, do some ssh reverse tunnel magic and go along with your day.

I didn’t say JavaScript… and I certainly wouldn’t choose TS for a personal project because I personally feel that its organization is terrible but I would choose TS over vanilla js for work projects because it does produce better group work and is easier to maintain long term because of the structure imposed on it.

Some people think better with typing information explicitly written out. Some people don’t. In my opinion it is a creativity thing. Some people like to make art that is photo realistic, some people like to make abstract art.

I understand both viewpoints. In my free time I vastly prefer late bound, dynamically types languages with robust reflection engineers built into their interpreters. For work, I heavily prefer late bound, strictly typed with reflection optional or minimal.

Different people think differently.

Hey, I marked only one jira with “Works as intended” for only one of the big reports related to it, thank you very much.

I was headed in the wrong direction for weeks

Oh boy. This comic brings back the horror of leftpad being removed from npm and how it felt like half the internet fell apart.

We have been doing some new pair work processes to expand group capabilities (and to train up some juniors) so I am happy to report that I got to share this with two whole people.

Documentation? 🤣😭

That’s part of why it took so long. Every day I thought I was done a new person would be added to the review and they would identify a security and/or use case edge case.

😅 Mine ended up being only like 50 lines or so total. Complex, pervasive, data coupling with security concerns and my own ignorance were the primary drivers for the time taken on this one.

And yet, somehow there is still a bug in the datetime implementation.

I’ll answer in a couple of different ways.

1. If I am writing library code my why is you have an end use and I don’t care why you use it and you don’t care why I wrote it. You only care about what my code does so you can achieve your why.

2. If we are working on the same code we have different whys but the same what. Then your comment as to why isn’t the same as mine which makes the comment incorrect.

3. We are looking at a piece of code and you want to know how it works, because the stated what is wrong (bugs). This might be the “why” you are looking for, but I call this a “how”. This is the case where self documenting code is most important. Code should tell a second programmer how the code achieves the what without needing an additional set of verbose comments. The great thing about code is that it is literally the instructions on the how. The problem is conveying the how to other programmers.

There are three kinds of how: self evident, complex how’s requiring multiple levels of abstraction and lots of code and complex short how’s that are not apparent.

The third is where most people get into trouble. Almost all of these cases of complexity can be solved with only a single layer of abstraction and achieve easily readable self documenting code. The problem for many cases is that they start as a one off and people are lousy at putting in the work on a one-off solution. Sometimes the added work of abstraction, and building a performant abstraction, makes a small task a large one. In these cases comments can make sense.

Sometimes these short, complex how’s require specialists. Database queries, performant perl/functional queries, algorithmic operations, complex compile time optimized templates (or other language specific optimizations) and the like are some of the most common examples of these. This category of problem benefits most from a well defined interface with examples for use (which might be comments). The “how” of these are not as valuable for the average developer and often require specialist knowledge regardless of comments for understanding how they work. In these cases what they do is far more valuable than how or why.

See, I think length limits and readability are sometimes at odds. To say that you 100% believe in length limits means that you would prefer the length limit over a readable line of code in those situations.

I agree that shorter lines are often more readable. I also think artificial limits on length are crazy. Guidelines, fine. Verbosity for the sake of verbosity isn’t valuable… But to say never is a huge stretch. There are always those weird edge cases that everyone hates.

This is a pretty ridiculous position to take but if you believe it then I’m glad you write the comments you do.

There is an argument that commenting on the lack of expected code is valuable for this reason, but it certainly isn’t true in all situations.

The most important thing is comprehension. If something is too long and the length makes it less readable then it is too long.

But if having 3-4 files open at the same time makes it harder for you to comprehend a single file because you can’t get the full picture, that’s on you.

I understand the concern, but readability and comprehension are way more important than line length. If the length impairs readability, it’s too long. Explicitly limits are terrible. Guidelines, fine.

Ultimately, you do you. I still think your crazy and I think your argument is poor.

I too used to think generics were superior until I learned parameter packs, type traits and SFINAE.