You should switch to Rust. Through massively impressive feats of compiler engineering and a phenomenal amount of novel syntax constructs that make Rust the hardest language for existing programmers to learn, the rustc team has successfully managed to move this agony from after the program compiles to before.
If I’m stuck on something for more than a few hours, I ask one of the more junior developers on my team if they have any ideas. Sometimes, a new perspective helps a lot!
Then when it’s a job, you can replace that with weeks. But instead of a silly syntax error, it’s a slow memory leak that nobody seems to have noticed for years, but that now forces you to restart your service every day at the very least. And we just spent an afternoon, six people, looking at it and only making it worse.
Hey at least they didn’t have to trace a bug in their core framework. Only to find it is both in the issue tracker and 10 years old, and there is no offical fix. So you have to make a hacky patch yourself
Time to delivery is important. Moving quickly withing a language and frameworks that prioritise speed over safety gets a product out the door is important when testing whether a business idea holds merit. Once you’re established with a better scope of the project you should be rewriting this in a static language.
Dynamically typed interpreted languages should never be used for long term support imo
Idunno, Ruby was my first language and the other day I was trying to write a one-file script to wrangle some CSV data and even that got irritating. What does this function need? What does it return? Who the fuck knows! Is it even a function? Run it and find out, loser
And I’ve got reasonably popular projects in ruby, I’m not a beginner.
Yeah I completely agree with you, but sometimes there are other things that jankier languages allow you to do. Say in python, you can do direct property assignment. This is gonna be annoying for someone later to figure out why their object has suddely changed, and without getters and setters, you’ll have a harder time picking apart what’s going on. The benefit though is that it’s very quick to just tack on a property onto some global object and then have that read elsewhere down the road.
It sucks, and you will curse yourself later, like you don’t even know what type it is, or maybe it’s just null, however it did allow you to ship a project. Maybe that bodge solution is indicative of needing a complete overhaul on how you structure your project, but until you get to that point where you’ve scoped out what the final idea looks like, it might not be time for static typing and good code design.
I also think that static typing and such makes you move a lot slower when making changes. I love rust to bits, but maintaining an old project is like wading through treacle. I only jump towards using it now once I’ve got a really great understanding of all the needs of the system, and have the time to really think about the problem in its entirety. Maybe you suddenly need a mutable self in somewhere that you didn’t before, perhaps that means going and refactoring a whole load of traits that were designed without mutability (for good reason).
Why make fun of it though? If you make typing and being checker-clean mandatory on a Python project, you get most of the benefits of static typing. The biggest hole is if the libraries you’re using aren’t properly type annotated. Perhaps I’d feel differently if the meat of my projects was the use of badly or un-typed packages, but thankfully it isn’t.
I would rather have a statically typed language with equivalent clarity, ease of use and extensive libraries, but the benefits of Python along with comprehensive, enforced type annotation are strong. Proper thread handling could be good, but since that forces you towards avoiding monolithic executables, and using asyncio (which is a delight to use), it’s almost a benefit.
I spent 4 hours today trying to figure out why a calculation to get a percentage (in decimal) was always returning exactly 1 no matter what parameters I tried passing to it. Turns out I’d forgotten to cast the ints being provided to decimal, even though I’ve had to do that so many times before. I’m not a sharp man
This meme was written by a novice that does not yet know true pain. An error that takes fifteen minutes to find! In your own code! Ha, you young whipper snapper… just wait until you have to debug an unforeseen edge case in a library… especially if it’s compiled. And once you’ve seen that, once you’ve known that horror, come and talk to me about DLL hell.
Unless you’re working with installers and, probably, in C++ it’s unlikely you’ll ever meet this Cthonic horror. Zalgo? Tony the Pony comes? You have met that friendly demon of development? They are but the apprentice… DLL hell is a span of time measured in days.
… Alternatively talk to me about trying to track down an extra newline at the end of a PHP file, that (against all advice) has a closing tag, that causes some output to be sent preventing you from sending headers to the client. There’s no error detection for that and PHP is an interpreted language… you just need to check files manually!
I once spent 6 months debugging an issue in a legacy component of our system that ultimately boiled down to “The team this component talks with forgot to revert changes they made for testing and obstinantely refused to admit any changes were made at all for 6 months until I could figure out this deprecated technology enough to prove it enough that the product owners forced them to look”
Not really programming but I once had an issue that lasted for months like that: I’m working with a software specific to our industry that generate quotes, sales order and production orders.
For quotes and sales order a PDF can be created and archived in the right folder automatically, or you can use the windows “Print to pdf” printer to do that manually which take closes to a minute for the sales person to create the right folder, with the right name and put the PDF in there with the order number.
The automatic PDF creation fail to include our logo each time and I battled for months with the software company that was telling me that everything is working fine.
Until I looked in the metadata of the PDF the company was sending us, few of the PDFs they were sending is did not have any logo and were created by their software, some had their logo and were created with an external PDF printer.
After I realized they had the same problem internally but were lying about it I just took a day to create a python script running as a service on the server that automatically add the logo on the PDF created and that was it.
The systems programmer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the scheduler that says “DOES THIS WORK LOL,” and the systems programmer has wept instead of LOLed, and the systems programmer has submitted a kernel patch to restore balance to The Force and fix the priority inversion that was causing MySQL to hang. A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law.
I spent 7 hours to debug why doubles in Java classes brick my class file parser only to discover the following small print in the specification after I read the corresponding OpenJDK source code: In retrospect, making 8-byte constants take two constant pool entries was a poor choice. Yeah no shit. I chose to write a custom user stylesheet for Oracle specifications to enlarge notes since they’re obviously critical to the implementation of JVMs. I guess the technical writers at Oracle didn’t want to offend the developers who wrote the JVM originally at the expense of developers who write JVMs today.
The thing is, you don’t make syntax mistakes on purpose. Especially if you know a language extremely well, a syntax error will happen at random, you won’t notice it (if you did, you would have fixed it), and it therefore becomes invisible to you.
Part of your brain “knows” there’s no error, because you know the language extremely well, and because if you had made an error, you would have fixed it.
This leads to acute, irrational frustration. It’s very human.
There’s not really a solution, just smoke more weed and take your eyes off the screen occasionally.
As someone who has taught people a variety of languages. No. This happens regardless of what language you choose. It’s just a universal programmer experience to get frustrated at your work
This sounds like they did not or could not explicitly compile it. Pretty much all popular languages are compiled. JS isn’t, but people are less likely to say that they ‘run’ that one. Ruby isn’t, but it’s not as popular as Python.
Well, and my preferred version of “everything looks good” is “everything compiles”, which with a strict enough language does also make failure during the first run much less likely.
I’m also not saying that these aspects are unique to Python.
The language failing to tell you where the issue is also happens in JS/TS, C/C++ and I’m going to presume Ruby, too.
Python is just again rather popular and some of these choices don’t make sense with my first hunch.
Honestly man it just sounds like you have struggled with dynamic languages and by extension prefer static (compiled) ones. Which is totally fine you don’t have to like everything. But I do think you’re missing the real issue with “everything looks good.” It’s a lack of experience with the tool. It doesn’t matter if you’re using something as strict as Rust or dynamic as Lisp. “Everything looks good,” is always bad. You should know “this is how this works,” which is just not something a newbie can handle when they still don’t know the difference between pass-by-reference and pass-by-value (or that those words even exist!)
I’ve had this experience in other languages, but never python. Find the missing semicolon and getting a cryptic error message is a very common programming experience.
The reason I never had this problem in python is that by the time I learned it, I was already a fairly experienced developer, and I used better tooling from the get go. This kind of error is reallllllly hard to make in a modern IDE using a linter and formatter.
That suggests to me that this is more likely a fairly language agnostic experience. It might even bias people against the languages they learn first.
I mean, I guess, it depends on your perspective. Some folks work in garbage/proprietary languages all day and would be very glad to have Python-levels of compiler help. Others work in JS/TS and do have similar nonsense to deal with as in Python.
But lots of languages, e.g. JVM languages, Rust etc., don’t struggle with semicolons and the like.
And they don’t have to compile at runtime, so they can easily outclass Python for more complex error reporting, which is at least my experience.
Personally, I have pretty much only had the experience of “tell me where the error is” in Python and TS.
I’ll always appreciate Lisp for the most powerful REPL in existence of programming languages by a long shot. Name me one programming language that empowers developers to troubleshoot and fix runtime errors with high availability like Lisp does:
Meh, who cares. Let’s continue to run.
Here’s a REPL with the app state at the time of the runtime error. Happy debugging!
Fix the bug in production inside of the REPL while everything continues to chug along.
Save the changes to disk and check it into version control.
The REPL in Lisp is so powerful that there’s an entirely different approach to developing apps in Lisp. You can, and some do, code everything inside of the REPL. When they’re done, they save the file to disk.
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