this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Programming

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What are some common misconceptions about programming that you'd like to debunk? (programming.dev)
submitted 7 months ago by mac@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 0 points 7 months ago (2 children)

This one's a hot take, but: That Python is easy.

I've had to work with it in three projects in the past five years and I consider it one of the hardest programming languages, for anything but very short scripts.

You don't get proper compiler assistance, unless you have 100% test coverage. You don't get a helpful text editor. You don't usually get helpful type hints in libraries you use, so you have to genuinely just study the documentation and/or code. You get tons of quirky behavior in the stdlib, build tools, async stack, imports. You get breaking changes in minor versions of the language.

I find writing code in Python extremely mentally taxing, because you just get so little assistance, that you have to think of everything yourself.

[–] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I don't know if i qualify as a full programmer, I'm an actuarie but 90% of my work is in python, 5% SQL and 5% excel. I love python because is flexible as fuck, I can connect to the SQL server, send the queries to a pd.DataFrame, process the information, scrap some webpage for adicional information needed, and finally export to an excel file that the accounting team can use. I don't write fully functional programs, but small specific scripts for different tasks. R is another popular programming language between actuaries and statisticians, but I haven't find anything that R can do, that I can't in python.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I don’t write fully functional programs, but small specific scripts for different tasks.

This is exactly why your experience is different and you like Python better than many others. You are using Python as it was meant to be used and where it excels; for small scripts.

When people say they don't like Python they mean that Python does a really, really bad job when it comes to larger systems. Static analysis becomes exponentially more important in larger systems and Python has basically 0 of that.

But as long as you stick to relatively small stuff (less than a few thousand lines), Python is pretty nice and fast to develop in.

[–] Flipper@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

So you are saying using python to write the server for a federated multimedia messenger is a bad idea.

Let me tell you, I'm shocked😲

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

Dynamically typed languages all suffer that fate. There's a reason Typescript literally has that feature in its name.

What does help though is type hinting. You "just" have to enforce it and its fallout in your entire codebase.

[–] pinchcramp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That programming as a career means you're going to spend writing nice, clean code 80% of the time.

It's rather debugging code or tooling problems 50% of the time, talking to other people (whether necessary or not) about 35% of the time and the rest may be spent on actually spending time doing the thing you actually enjoy.

I may be exaggerating, but only a little.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In my experience, you're rather inaggerating. I'm not even 10y into my career and if I get to actually code for 2h a day, that's already a success. Most of my time nowadays is documentation, meetings, jira, research and calls with the clients.

[–] pinchcramp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I think it heavily depends on the size and (management) culture of your employer. My most recent gig had me sit in way too many meetings that were way too long (1hr daily anyone?), dealing with a lot of tooling issues and touching legacy code as little as possible while still adding new features to our main product on a daily basis. Obviously "we don't need a clean solution. We're going to replace that codebase anyways, next year™".

The job before that had me actually code for about 80% of the time, but writing tests is annoying and slows you down and we don't have time for that. Odd how there was always time for fixing the regressions later.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

I think it's also a question of how you position yourself. Without noticing it, I've developed a kind of "will to power" in the sense that I want to shape the product we're working on. So instead of just sitting in my corner and working on ticket after ticket, I'm actively seeking conversations with stakeholders to find out, whether it even makes sense to implement it as described in the ticket, or propose new ideas, etc.

Also, my mother taught me (by virtue of being completely untechnical) how to explain complex problems and systems in a way that non-technical people understand. So if "a developer" was needed, management often enough volunteered me.

I could pull myself mostly out of this stuff, but I'd get even more frustrated not being able to at least try to make things a bit better. So I'm putting on the headset once more.

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I've got a lot of these.

Programming is not doing leetcode problems all day long. Those problems can be a good brain exercise or a good prep for a [misguided] technical interview but in a real programming job you have next to no chance of running into problems like those. Even if you do, you're an idiot if you spend hours toiling away at a problem that somebody else already solved much more efficiently than you will. Your boss doesn't give a crap if you pulled all of the code straight from your brain.

Programmers are not hackers. The reverse might be true but hacking is about finding problems (and exploiting them) while programming is about fixing problems.

A programmer can do anything that involves code. Maybe not quite this succinct but I think most will assume you can write a mobile app or a website just because you say you can code. Websites, games, apps, and so on are written in code but they all involve different technologies, toolsets, and standards. I'm sure I could fumble my way through any kind of software but don't expect it done quickly if it's not my area of expertise.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

Especially regarding the first one: this seems like a very US-centric thing - or maybe a non-german thing. I've been in a bunch of interviews on both sides of the table here in Germany and I've literally never encountered a single leetcode question. At all.

[–] 0xCAFE@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

"We're going to clean up that code later."

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.de 0 points 7 months ago

Everyone can code.