Are rustaceans cantankerous?

Okay, I’ll go tell management they’ve failed. 🙄

Show me a place where this isn’t the case. Because I’ve never seen it not be the case in 20+ years in the field.

I mean, what we have now is a clique of ideologically-aligned people who insta-approve each other’s bad PRs outside their domain and ignore or jam-up the PRs of people outside their clique.

You can say it’s a failure of management, but this is the primary tool used by the ideologues. And I’ve seen it used so at various places.

What I haven’t seen is a real dissemination of knowledge about the code via review. At least not above and beyond what can be achieved by looking at the code and using blame to see the changesets and looking at the associated issues.

The signal-to-noise ratio of reviews is nearly zero in my experience. It’s for the least productive people on the team to argue about spaces or gotos or grind other ideological axes.

I find PRs really dumb things down, but not in a way that makes code more understandable. And it certainly doesn’t improve quality.

Why would you ask permission to do something necessary? Just do it any time you have a ticket in the area.

One place I worked at had a rule forbidding pure refactors. One, it’s no other department’s (or manager’s) business that you massaged something to be more useful. Two, what is QA supposed to do with a change that has no new features or bug fixes? Three, are you going to put “refactor” in your release notes? Four, why are you refactoring things out of the scope of a feature or bugfix?

Ditto.

The entire concept behind genAI coding is you can pay a recent grad peanuts to babysit (read: be liable for the mistakes of) a computer to program itself.

I don’t understand the articles breathlessly saying that there’s skyrocketing demand for senior engineers and plummeting demand for juniors. What is the expertise for if AI is so smart?

Or are we finally saying the quiet part out loud — that genAI is making subtle mistakes that take experience to spot?

🙄

Oh no, you’re right, strings are famously difficult to print in C.

Judging by frequency, code reviews are for the least pleasant people on the team to grind ideological axes.

printf(“hello world!”);

If this is famously difficult to you, I don’t think computer science is your bag.

COBOL.

C.

I exaggerate a bit. C99 lets you declare variables anywhere inside the block, not just the top.

Which still got me into an argument with a coworker who wanted me to declare every variable at the top of the block “in case” we port the code to a compiler that doesn’t support it.

C99 was 20 years old at that point.

Newer versions of C have generics “support” but I haven’t seen it in the wild yet.

I’m the wrong person to ask. My goto language is older than I am and hasn’t had a meaningful change since I was born.

I hear they’re changing the language these things run on from JavaScript to TypeScript.

No thanks to the hamster wheel.

Flash had its use. I think a better analogy for me is web frameworks.

I remember in the mid 2000s there seems to be a new one every week. “LOL, you aren’t using Ruby On Rails? Peasant!” “LOL, you aren’t using Django? Peasant!”

Still seems to be the case with Electron, React, Node, blah blah blah.

Running to stand still.

Articulates the conclusion I’ve come to.

The idea that fetuses today will never catch up to a technology touted as easy enough for a dog to use is absurd.

If this stuff is so amazing, then I’ll pick it up when it matures.

It frankly doesn’t solve any problems I have. PR approvals are my bottleneck, not writing code.

And as more people outsource their thinking to LLMs, the less intelligent they are on their own.

Hope you have enough tokens and the server isn’t 404.

Clean up the mess that AI has made.

Didn’t you hear? We’re going back to KLOC for measurement of productivity.

Bug report: shows April when it’s March.