The Joys Of Programming

Programming hot take:

I think fonts like Fira Code, which combine certain multi-character combinations into a single ligature (eg. turning -> and => into single arrow characters) are absolutely repulsive.

I don't mind (and in fact personally use) fonts which add extra glyphs to do more visually appealing things in text mode, because I live in the terminal and nice looking stuff is great. But a font that actually screws with the character rendering of source code is about ten bridges too far.

Only every day. It was just recently that I finally gave up my own hand-rolled zsh prompt scripts that I've used for years, and tried some of the prompts out there. Started using Spaceship, and then Starship knocks on my door like, "hey, what if Spaceship but in Rust instead of slow?".

I have to say, it's vindicating seeing a lot of these popular prompts now doing a 3-line format, where the top line is a blank line for separation, then there's the dedicated informational line, then last a clean input line with just the prompt character. My custom prompts were like that, and for years it felt a bit like swimming upstream. Most of the custom prompts I'd see were instead really fat one-liners, with a lot of the informational stuff dumped into $RPS1 so that it comes from the right side, and no leading blank lines. Having line breaks in $PS1 seemed not exactly unheard of, but less than idiomatic.

I've thought about trying out Powerlevel10k, but Starship pretty much filled my need of giving me something good that I don't need to fiddle with, allowing me get back to my more important work of fiddling with Neovim.

I tried startship in the git bash shell for Windows and it seems really slow for some reason, but it was fine in normal Powershell. I love it on Linux, of course.

Half of Reddit's /r/ProgrammingHumor is variations of "I just copy stuff from StackOverflow", and I'm 100% certain those "jokes" are mostly confessions.

Still...better than Javascript.

While writing this post about how the grammar between spoken languages can vary significantly
(https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/1278186?page=831#comment-17488685)
I was reminded me of how odd reverse polish notation (postfix) is until you understand it's advantages:

Pretty sure I first learned about it in University since most programming languages use forward polish notation (prefix) for functions and infix for math and operators. Except Scheme (Lisp and similar) which uses prefix for everything.

Man, this person's blog is spot on. I am loving every entry I read so far. https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-am...

I’m kinda deep into this, with a neovim plugin to manage keybinds when in a neovim instance inside a tmux instant, but I might check out Zellen.

OK that was great and a few genuinely laugh out loud jokes.

So how do you deal with a coworker who constantly holds up your code review or pull requests for pedantic shit? Like wasted an entire day last sprint and again this sprint?

Like multiple times for the same type of stuff, including something they approved a week ago for the exact same type of code? And when you link to their previous approval they still push back and want you to change for... I don't f*cking know why?

Team lead is aware and has already talked to them once. Team manager as well. Trying not to be confrontational about it but feels like this is not going to survive the full 12 months of my contract.

Everyone else on the team is great. Like 10 of the greatest people I have ever worked with. But this one person... I'm not sure how much more I can take.

Are you collocated? If so do the review at the same computer so you can discuss instead of going back and forth for a day. If not, schedule a code review meeting.

Remote. The back and forth does take up more time. But it also allows me to compose my thoughts instead of screaming WTF at them.

Having rules about who resolves comments seems a bit petty

In my team, discussions like this lead to a rule that reviewers should distinguish whether their comments are suggestions or blockers, and if they have no blocking issues they should approve the PR even if comments are open. And it's worked pretty well, if the comments are good people often address them, even if they're non-blocking and the PR was mergeable.

OTOH we have no process with comments; we resolve them sometimes to manage clutter, but with no particular significance to it.

I guess the question is “are their suggestions ever useful?”. I have one pedantic co-worker who also annoyingly works a 4 day week, remotely, time offset. When he ends up reviewing a patch it often turns into a multi week code review process. The problem is that once you get all the way through the process he’s generally right and the code is better for it.

If it’s useful, then great. If it’s not then you need to review your teams’ code review policy. I have a strong feeling that most simple/pedant things can be caught by linters/static analysers. Have those linters are part of your pre-merge workflow. Then the rule is don’t bother looking for those things. Code review should be about making sure the patch and commit message match. It does what it says, the logic looks reasonable and testing is in place. Everything else is a matter of personal taste and not relevant.