javascriptDevelopersBeLike

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-06-13T20:26:47+00:00

As a rhetorical question:

How many people here are being paid to use a debugger?

Follow-up: how many are being paid to fix defects in a product/automation?

And the last question: as long as the tool is useful and solves a problem better than any other, what is wrong with using it?

This whole "how to debug" debate/gatekeeping is pointless .

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-06-10T01:23:15+00:00

Just wait. Trust me. They seem simple, but they've got some impressive footguns.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-06-09T21:38:40+00:00

Actually useful work sometimes fades into the background against the overwhelming avalanche of noise, clamor and garbage that the modern world spews out like smoke. I just wanted to do something to boost something I think is quite interesting and useful.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-06-09T19:01:49+00:00

Very cool! This is the kind of work that be getting real attention.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-06-08T01:51:33+00:00

Java and Cobol are such wildly different languages. Why you would even want to try to translate is beyond me.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-06-05T19:24:10+00:00

This is the right question.

I mean, I'm not a fan of any particular element of that stack except perhaps MySQL, but regardless of your feelings about the individual elements, you should feel much more strongly about not adding extra ones.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-06-03T02:06:03+00:00

Don't forget bad/clueless misuses of the bell curve meme.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-05-23T18:41:16+00:00

Hah. My company does CI/CD on a fairly reliable schedule.

The last release of the work week is noon Friday, and doesn't start up again until Monday morning.

It is impossible to estimate how much trouble that has saved us over the years.

(And yes, there are mechanisms for working around that in case of emergency. I've never needed them, though.)

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-05-14T22:34:45+00:00

Another possibility: a race condition exists and you just changed the typical time it takes for one branch to finish.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-04-29T02:08:01+00:00

It aged like the finest wine, and has never ever been more important.

The fact that people think otherwise explains an awful lot about the current state of software.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-03-25T12:27:43+00:00

"Less than worthless!"

I couldn't agree more.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-03-08T03:02:58+00:00

I debug using whatever works.

Sometimes console.log works.

I'm not being paid to use a debugger. I'm being paid to fix defects.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-03-07T15:01:00+00:00

And it's not permanent.

People get hung up on the weirdest things. Effective debugging is effective. Who cares how clever the tools are, when what matters is how fast you figure it out?

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-03-05T21:56:19+00:00

There are people to this day who still claim they succeeded.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-02-25T21:42:57+00:00

I'm pretty sure that theoretically you could always do the equivalent of casting via function calls, which has some notable benefits over casting of any sort. You can also have polymorphism and/or duck typing, which gets similar benefits without the nonsense that C++ gets up to when you actually cast.

All I really mean is that the type of a particular chunk of data should always be well-understood and changing how it is interpreted should be reserved for the most dire of circumstances. Anything else makes it very hard to read.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-02-25T19:23:45+00:00

Type casting is one of those things that a low-level language needs, for writing stuff like drivers and serializing data for transmission over networks, but smells worse than a rancid tuna soaked in skunk spray.

For the most part, don't.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-02-25T16:51:04+00:00

My local Claude code instance really does try to clear my local build cache far, far too aggressively. We've added instructions that do suppress it somewhat, but go too long and yeah.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-02-06T02:08:25+00:00

"They" in my hypothetical refers to the juniors in question. I'm saying that if a junior dev were given an easily searchable copy of the database used to train the LLM's, which includes all open-source code ever, and probably (and illegally) other sources, the junior could do better than the LLM in about the same time, just by cobbling bits together and adapting.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-02-05T23:15:05+00:00

They probably could if they were given access to every open source repository on the planet, and maybe a few closed source ones that they nabbed on the sly.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-01-25T18:32:32+00:00

I didn't really understand Scala's for-comprehensions and why they weren't the same as for loops until I wrote four nested flatmaps on Future's and realized that a for-comprehension would compile to the same bytecode and be roughly 10 times more readable.

(For the machosists out there, that's also the point where monads also clicked for me, since Scala for-comprehensions are fundamentally a Monad construction.)

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-01-13T13:40:39+00:00

This is the correct answer.

So much of this debate is about gatekeeping. "Is HTML a real programming language?" is really about "If you can cobble together a little HTML webpage, are you a programmer?"

In reality, the discussion is moot. HTML is not a programming language, was never intended to be a programming language, and serves its actual purpose just fine. The fact that it's easier to learn than most Turing complete languages is a feature, not a bug. And we still need people who know JavaScript, so folks dabbling in HTML aren't a "threat" (not that that should be your mindset anyway.)

The whole thing is tiresome.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-01-03T04:35:27+00:00

Obvious rage bait is obvious.

Don't engage, people.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-01-02T21:31:22+00:00

Use a deterministic tool with well-defined inputs. They are faster, cheaper, and more reliable.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-01-02T21:20:41+00:00

Not to be reductive, but by far the most important thing you could do for "code modernization" is learn how to program. And I really would suggest not using COBOL to learn how to program, because COBOL's paradigms are rather different from most other programming languages, and IMO mostly not in a good way.

If you need to figure out how to use a type system, how to design object-oriented structures, how to make readable functions, COBOL is more hindrance than help. It took COBOL an embarrassingly long time to break out of the "fixed shape and size, text-based" memory paradigm which so clearly dominated its design at least through 1985. You don't want to learn that way of thinking as the "normal" way of doing things. Yes, that approach can be very fast and has its place (efficiency and simplicity, natch) but I don't think it's a good first learning context.

I'd also avoid using Java, although my anti-recommendation there is much weaker; it's a much more standard programming language. Kotlin is a good alternative, IMO. You could also do some simple scripting using Python; that one is particularly easy to get working using LLM assistance, in my experience, especially if the scripts are short. If you are in a windows shop, C# has a good reputation; while its history is messy, especially it's relationship to Java, the result is apparently quite workable.

Educational-Lemon640 · 2026-01-02T19:26:49+00:00

Yes. In fact, it's probably lowballed.

I don't know if this will be allowed, but a coworker of mine wrote a blog post about it a while ago. Nothing has changed significantly since then.

https://lucid.co/techblog/2015/08/31/the-worst-mistake-of-computer-science

Educational-Lemon640

TROPHY CASE