I enjoy writing software more than I enjoy using software. I'm not berating myself over this, nor am I proud of it. It's just how I am.

What this means in practice is that I will often write a whole bunch of code before I even start trying to debug it. Writing code tickles what I imagine is the creative part of my brain, and it feels good. Running and debugging code tickles the "chore" part of my brain and it doesn't feel as good.

(Yes, programming is creative. It's an act of creation. I'm emphasizing this point because there is a tendency in non-technical circles to view programming as something sterile or clinical, like accounting. I would imagine, however, that there are very few accountants who do accounting in their spare time, whereas you can easily find tons of programmers who do coding in their spare time, myself included).

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I'm a pretty big fan of TypeScript, probably best described as a statically typed language that transpiles to standard JavaScript. I've written about it before.

People who have worked with me in the past may be surprised at my admiration, given the rancour I occasionally direct at something like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-to-JavaScript transpiler, which to the casual eye seems to be in a similar vein.

The similarities, however, are superficial; TypeScript and GWT are quite different beasts. Something like GWT is used in web development in order to avoid writing JavaScript. TypeScript, on the other hand, is best viewed as JavaScript extended with an optional static typing system. The optional part is key; in theory, any JavaScript program is also a valid TypeScript program. In other words, TypeScript doesn't try to hide the fact that it's merely an enhanced version of JavaScript.

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If I say that my professional life has spanned RCS, CVS, Mercurial and Git, this tell you something (depressing) about my age.

Like everyone else, I'm now a git user, but I still say that Mercurial was the most elegant of the bunch, at least in terms of its emmiently predictable and well-designed CLI, even if the software itself gave up the ghost years ago.

Back in the day, when version control systems were still duking it out, I used to try and defend Mercurial to rabid git fans, mostly to no avail. I always felt that I was at a bit of a disadvantage in those conversation (cue the git fans yelling "Yeah, cuz mercurial SUCKS!"), because I was always willing to concede, despite appreciating Mercurial's virtues, that git actually did have its strengths as well as its weaknesses, while the git fans were rarely so magnanimous with any other VCS.

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I don't know about awesome, but I usually find myself enjoying SQL more than I think I will.

I feel this is accurate :-)

After working with Typescript, I don't think I can go back to Javascript.

Apparently 42.5% of developers "love" C while 57.5% of developers "dread" it.  #devsurvey2019 #culturaldivide

According to StackOverflow developer survey results, Python is  a "loved" language, which is at odds with how it's viewed among my peers, who tend to hate it.  Typescript is also a "loved" language, which I can get on board with.

I made the mistake of blinking and now Angular is on version a million

Google's AngularJS is one of the most popular web frameworks out there, but it comes with its share of criticism (performance around two way binding being one of the more prominent complaints). Google responded by releasing Angular 2 (and, as of now, 4, 5 and 6), which addressed some of the issues but at the cost of being drastically incompatible with its predecessor, with no realistic way to upgrade except through pure elbow grease. Angular 2+ might as well be a completely different framework.

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I'm sorry everyone, but two spaces is not enough indentation.

I've been a programmer by trade ever since I graduated from University. This is a fairly long time, as these things are measured. I still consider myself on a learning curve, but that's a separate conversation.

My career, such as it is, mostly sidestepped the whole static versus dynamic typing debate that roiled in the early 2000's. School, when it veered into software territory, mostly consisted of C and Java, two statically typed languages. My professional life, until fairly recently, has been mostly in Java (with a bit of C++ thrown in for good measure) and hence has almost exclusively revolved around statically typed languages.

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Is there a word for the suspicion a programmer feels when something they wrote works on the first try?

God deliver me from Perl

If you have functions with shared data, then what you have a class, whether or not you choose to use the word.

Reactive programming feels like wiring a circuit.

Javascript people: React or Angular?

In a previous post I wrote down some notes on the current state of the python packaging ecosystem. I felt that this was useful because most of the information that I found online was out of date or spread out in various places.

One area that still confuses me is the relative merits of requirements.txt versus setup.py files. Ironically, the best article I've read on the subject is aimed at ruby developers. I think python developers should read it - it's surprising (or maybe not so surprising) how similar the ecosystems are in this respect. I've even made a handy Rosetta stone, which is hopefully not completely inaccurate:

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Badges, on github and other code sharing sites, are a way to communicate small snippets of information concerning the status of your repository. They generally appear on your README file, so they are one of the first things you see when you load a repository page.

On my yawt page, for example, you can see several badges for things like my travis build status, and my GPA at code climate.

One thing that I couldn't find, however, was a pylint badge - a simple status that displayed your pylint score. This surprised me; it seemed like it should have been a common thing to want to do. Indeed, I'm still not 100% sure that I haven't simply overlooked something glaringly obvious.

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