I learned with python and switched to rust when that started to piss me off. It’ll be awhile until you know enough about why you want a different language for a task. Until then, python and JavaScript are totally fine; you may never even need to leave those ecosystems depending on what you want to do.
Every decision I’ve made to write code with poor maintainability was driven by time pressure to deliver
Every bad decision in my code bases were because I didn’t have enough time to do things the right way
With LLMs I get work done about 3-5x faster. Same level of maintainability and readability I’d have gotten writing it myself. Where LLMs fail is architecting stuff out- they can’t see the blind alleys their architecture decisions being them down. They also can’t remember to activate python virtual environments, like, ever.
Infinite loop and hard coded magic constant; this should have a configurable timeout and a resource file the string is read from so we can internationalize the application. Additionally, the use of a goto with a hard coded line number is a runtime bug waiting to happen after unrelated refactors; it’s best to use a looping construct that has more deterministic bounds.
What about doing grpc / protobuf stuff
Bug reports against the Python standard library and core Python packaging utilities. My day job is in QA, so the bugs were easy to read and reproduce; the stdlib ones were all fixed in the next Python patch. Whenever I’m not burnt out I plan on fixing the packaging one myself 🫠
The question becomes, then, if I spend 5 years learning and mastering C++ versus rust, which one is going to help me produce a better product in the end?
An acquaintance of mine once wrote a finite element method solver entirely in C++ templates.
It’s a 17 year old tool in the world’s most popular scripting language. It’s effectively had billions of tests run against it.
This is cool. I had no idea about most of these.
Storage data structures. Database tables are designed for fast read/write. Excel is designed for fast simultaneous parallel computation.
To get a sense of what this looks like, you can read more about their data structures; Databases typically store data in what’s called a “B Tree” and spreadsheets typically store as a format that can be easily converted into a “Directed Acyclic Graph” (although Excel lets you turn off the “acyclic” part if you allow circular references).
Although, with Excel specifically, there’s probably not much difference since it has some database functionality now.
With non-wifi devices I can be certain I won’t be bamboozled into buying something cloud-only
I always leave my project in a state where it doesn’t compile or run (not commits, obvs) so I’m forced back into understanding exactly what I was doing when I left off to fix the error.
How do I remember what the command even is? Like how would I discover the grep tool without using the Internet?
Online
Ok but what if my Wi-Fi isn’t working
In a past career, I was a mechanical design engineer; I’ve probably spent 10,000 hours of my life in SolidWorks. Not once did I feel like a 3d mouse would speed me up or otherwise solve my problems. I trialed a spacepilot for several months and just couldn’t be arsed after awhile. What do others get out of them?
Some places are inextricably tied to SimuLink due to how long it was around before any of the alternatives.
The only thing to do is ride the wave of the new technology. You either do that or drown. I’ve written a literal book’s worth of text on how AI should think and behave when writing software and it straight up cannot write code as well as me when left to its own devices, even with all my guidance. LLMs, no matter the size, are structurally incapable of holding all the context needed to write good code in complex systems because they cannot compress complex topics into ideas they’ve never encountered and reason about the compressed state with their limited reasoning capacity (otherwise known as “learning”).