Doc Avid Mornington

That’s how you talk?

What? Your colleague sounds like they may be struggling with some serious cognitive issues, they may want to see a doctor about that. As for me, I’ve been living with my brain my entire life, and have kept several different sleep schedules in that time, for one reason or another, including rigid adherence to a schedule you would certainly approve of, and at no time has the basic fact that my brain works better later in the day ever changed. Some people never learn that their own circumstances and experience are not universal. Maybe try not to be one of those people.

I am definitely not at my most productive at the start of the day.

Or gets promoted, and keeps moving on to new and bigger projects, leaving a trail of destruction, because all management sees is they close tickets faster than the people who are busy picking up the pieces behind them.

Emacs Magit is so much better than the CLI, and I don’t say that lightly. And it’s available on Linux.

I do rather like science.

Medication helps a lot of people, and CBT is very effective for others. I’ve never heard of a “technique” that’s effective against depression that can be reasonably described like that, but I’m not an expert. Would love some concrete examples.

Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow

Sure, stateless functions deal with and impact state in some way. If that’s what you meant by your previous comment, that’s fine, but that’s honestly not what would typically be meant by “juggling” state.

The part about declarative languages has nothing to do with state. Declarative languages do not give the programmer control over flow, the other part of your definition.

Learn Lisp, and you will never again be so certain about the difference between a programming language and a data format.

No, my question does not imply a pure functional language at all. Pure functions exist in languages which are not purely functional. Most of the functions I write are pure functions. I could have a workflow where I work with another programmer who handles the minimal stateful pieces, and I would only write stateless functions - would that make me not a programmer?

(There are also purely functional languages, by the way. I just didn’t remotely imply there were, or make any claims about them, at any point in this thread, prior to this parenthetical.)

The part about declarative languages has nothing to do with state, or functional languages. Declarative languages are a whole different thing. Of course declarative languages handle state. The comment I was replying to said “Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow”. Declarative languages don’t involve juggling control flow.

I didn’t say there is…

No, it’s really not.

So, writing stateless functions, or working in declarative languages doesn’t count?

You only named one upside, I can’t think of any other, and C-like syntax is pretty common, so it’s not much of an upside. It’s at least debatable whether the JVM is a good thing at all - the majority of languages get along perfectly well without it, and there’s no reason to believe the ones that do target it wouldn’t be doing just fine if it didn’t exist. It’s weird to say Java gave a job to anybody - the demand to have software written resulted in programmers being hired; if Java hadn’t been pushed on the market by Sun, it would have just been another language. Java didn’t establish any fundamentals at all, it just borrowed from other places. While all three of the other languages you mention are interesting, for sure, I’m not sure why somebody who doesn’t like Java should limit themselves to JVM languages.

I get the feeling you feel like I was somehow calling you out. I want to clarify the the intent of my message was more in the spirit of “wow must be nice” than “you’re making that up”. But also I’m just interested in how different your experience is from mine.

Who said anything about only requiring 1 reviewer?

I must have misunderstood. You said “If no one has reviewed your change within 24 hours you are allowed to approve it yourself.” To me, that sounds like, after 24 hours of no review, one self-approval is considered sufficient. That, in turn, seems to imply that before 24 hours, one non-self-approval is probably sufficient, no?

You should try working for a healthy team where everyone takes collective responsibility and where the teams progress is more important than any one person’s progress.

I’ve had team members in the past who are very self-focused, they tend to close a lot of tickets and look good, then get promoted out, leaving an unmaintainable mess behind. Allowing that is generally a failure of leadership. But right now, that’s not our problem, and what you describe is pretty much how we operate.

I’d love to work on a team where everybody took code review a lot more seriously, believe me, it’d be nice, but my team does generally get everything approved, with at least two non-self approvals, in under 24 hours. If something is getting ignored because people are busy and it’s a large change because we aren’t perfect, and there is some reason to get it in soon, it just takes a quick request on Slack to get the needed attention.

What I found surprising about your description was more that the potential of a self-approval coming up would, in itself, get people’s attention, rather than somebody reaching out personally and asking for a review.

Our big weakness is review quality, not quantity. It’s crazy the number of times I look at something and see the two or three approvals already, start going through it, and find issue after issue. I see that on other teams as well, where there’s usually only one or two devs who ever really make any comments on a review, it seems to be very common.

which usually leads to someone taking a look

Nevermind the idea that one reviewer is somehow sufficient, this sounds like pure fantasy. Did you forget a “/s”?

Where do you work, and are they hiring?

I’m an old emacs warrior, tired of the war. I’m Church of Emacs, but why? I don’t know what I don’t know about the advantages of vi/vim, I only know that when I see other coders use them, they seem to weave the magic about as well as I do.

I know that I have a ton of built-up configuration code that makes emacs the perfect editor for me. I know that I can’t imagine using git much without magit, or how I would organize anything without org-mode, or how I could tolerate the frustration of editing in a container on a remote server without tramp. I know that I have a huge familiarity bias.

I know that whenever I see anybody with with any of these flashy new-fangled editors, they spend most of their time futzing around with dials and buttons and other gadgets, and thinking about how cool it all is, rather than thinking about the code. They start projects really quickly, they handle some refactoring edge cases slightly faster, but they take forever to do any real work, and are completely unprepared to do anything with a new language or text structure at all.

I say: Vim and Emacs against the world.

Well, we could end capitalism, and demand that AI be applied to the betterment of humanity, rather than to increasing profits, enter a post-scarcity future, and then do whatever we want with our lives, rather than selling our time by the hour.

Even when Emacs had two GUI versions, the default keys were pretty much the same between them, as far as I recall, excepting features missing from one or the other. For a very long time now, it’s all been reconciled as GNU Emacs, anyhow, whether CLI or XWin GUI, or even on a Mac or (shudder) MS Windows. I just use my local running Emacs, with my preferred configuration, to edit files anywhere, such as inside a running container on a remote server in AWS, so it’s pretty consistent for me.