Missing "how to politely but firmly tell management 'that's a dumb fucking idea'"
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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Programmer Humor
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Using Solutions that Already Exist
No, seriously, you don't have to build everything from scratch by yourself. Other people write code too.
It's a double-edged sword and understanding when to re-use and when to re-implement is an art that goes wrong more often than right.
We desperately need to teach people when a 3rd party dependency is necessary and not just optional to save writing a single function (cough left pad cough).
Also when the dependency is really good but other considerations override it being a viable option like security or code ownership.
How we all didn't collectively learn our lesson from left pad baffles me.
Got caught in that trap at my first coding job. Made a sort formula and a sr dev asked my I didn’t just use the array.sort.
My answer: I didn’t know it was there.
Ah, the ever-elusive, mysterious stage in my process - the one I can't ever seem to move much before the "planning" and at least "beginning to implement" stages, and sometimes stubbornly comes even later than that.
History of software design would be an AMAZING course.
It'd be a good idea. Hopefully it'd see an end to those idiots claiming single exit means there can only be one return statement.
I always find it funny to see calls to “unlearn oop”. It’s a tool, useful in some contexts and not useful in others. At some point industry treated it like a silver bullet, and now people are reacting to it by checks notes treating the hot new paradigm as a silver bullet.
learn oop, learn fp, learn logic programming, learn whatever you want. Also, learn when not to use them.
It’s a tool, useful in some contexts and not useful in others.
In my opinion this is a thought terminating cliche in programming and the IT industry in general. It can be, and is, said in response to any sentiment about any thing.
Now, saying what sort of context you think something should or should not be used in, and what qualities of that thing make it desirable/undesirable in that context, could lead to fruitful discussion. But just "use the right tool for the right job" doesn't contribute anything.
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There's a lot of humour in there, but this:
CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies
Discuss and dissect historically significant products, including VisiCalc, AppleWorks, Robot Odyssey, Zork, and MacPaint. Emphases are on user interface and creativity fostered by hardware limitations.
I'd take that course in a heart beat. I've read some of Atkinson's ideas and thoughts, and the man was deeply sane.
It must be decades now that my LinkedIn background banner is a screen shot of Zork source code.
deeply sane
I hope somebody describes me like this one day.
Hello programmers, electrical engineer here.
I work in MEP design, basically power design for commercial buildings and multi-tenant residential.
I am constantly saying I wish every fucking engineer, architect, interior designer, building manager, etc. had been forced to take a class on project management and accountability.
Curious if some of you run into a similar desire...
It'd be fun to talk shop with the fast code in slow languages folks. I do that for a living. I remember three ways, but I'm sure there's more:
- "Just use a better data structure"
- "My language is a DSL for a faster language" (Polars, Numpy, etc)
- "My compiler is surprisingly good if I'm careful" (Julia, JVM, etc)
Arguably "we can just put it in docker, and create an auto scaling microservice with a load balancer, behind a CDN for avg request latency" fits this group too. The hoops I have to jump through to get a good user experience on top of our shitty PHP backend are unreal
That's not what I was thinking but I like it! Http caching is pretty magic. Stateless nodes and easy scaling too.
For some kinds of problems you really can't beat varnish and friends. It's how we have Wikipedia, after all.
It's almost always slow is ways that the language choice doesn't matter even a little
I feel like I'm the only CS major to have taken a CS focused ethics class
Would be nice if all engineers had to take ethics
I'm a CS major who had to take ethics, but the REQUIRED textbook was written by the professor teaching the class. Managed to get through the semester with an A without buying it and called him out in the class survey.
I was required to take an ethics class, but it was a complete joke. Guy just wasted a bunch of time on very surface-level, Philosophy 101 stuff like talking about who Aristotle was. I'm not sure we even had homework actually. Real ethics were nowhere to be found.
I'm fairly certain that people who advocate for teaching ethics, only do it under the assumption that people are being taught to do what the proponent wants. In reality learning ethics is just learning different theories of ethics.
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"Key Search Words 101". Make it quicker and easier to find other programmers solutions on the web.
I've never seen a course on functional programming. That would be interesting.
It's what the Wizard Book (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) was written for.
My uni had one. Sadly I couldn't fit it into my schedule because of overlaps and other requirements.
i took two courses on functional programming through coursera. it was based on scala.
I had one. I wish I remembered more of it.
I would actually love to take 3300! That sounds fun.
As for 4020, writing performant code in Python typically means calling into libraries that are written in C.
-1 for unlerning OOP
But
+1 for Zork
+1 for unlearning OOP
It's a cult
Like everything that's impressive at first sight, but misunderstood because you never go past that first impression.
Why? I find it quite useful.
That's because you haven't unlearned it yet
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