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What do you dislike about your favorite language?

Meghan (she/her) on June 02, 2018

To truly appreciate our languages, we must know their faults. So what's your pet peeves and biggest pains in you side about your favorite language you use everyday?

Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers • Jun 2 '18

In Python, if you write multiple strings adjacent to each other, Python concatenates them. For me, this often leads to annoying bugs like

l = [
    "A",
    "B"
    "C",
    "D"
]

print l
# prints ["A", "BC", "D"]

Valentin Baca • Jun 4 '18

You can thank ISO C for that one:

Not that python directly inherits the behavior, but they probably decided to go with that behavior based on how C does it.

Meghan (she/her) • Jun 2 '18

Ouch! Haha yeah I can see how that hide it self well!

Pert Soomann • Jun 3 '18

When you see that one article saying that "this language X is so dead!" and it makes you doubt your life choices.

Casey Brooks • Jun 4 '18 • Edited

In Java and Kotlin, I usually create literal arrays with each item on a new line and all columns lined up nicely. To add a new item, I can then just copy any line and change what I need. To edit all items at once I just add a carat at the beginning of each line and off I go.

EXCEPT FOR THE LAST LINE WHICH DOESN'T HAVE A COMMA.

val items = arrayOf(
    Item(1, "One",   1.1),
    Item(2, "Two",   2.2),
    Item(3, "Three", 3.3),
    Item(4, "Four",  4.4),
    Item(5, "Five",  5.5) // <-- I want to put a comma here so badly!
)

Martin Becker • Jun 3 '18 • Edited

For me I would say in ruby how easy it is for nil to passed around which then causes can't do #x for nil and then you're like, "why is it nil?" it's even worse when you get nil in weird strange places.

Doshirae • Jun 3 '18

In Ruby, the fact that the normally-named filter function is named select or find_all is really annoying

And oh gosh way too many methods for the objects that is insane. You can easilly cut it down to 2 times less because there is a lot of aliases too

Antonin J. (they/them) • Jun 3 '18

Golang is one of my favorite languages and the thing I find the most frustrating is the lack of architecture standards.

Up until recently, it's been a wild west as far as package management and project setup. Where do you put your code? How do you structure your folders? What web frameworks are actually worth investing into?

Basically same issues Node had early on. It's getting MUCH better but I feel like it's still a problem.

Ben W • Jun 4 '18

I feel like you just dont need a framework in Go, also hasn't the location of where the code should go been in the documentation since release?

Ian Spence • Jun 4 '18

Golangs lack of enum support is easily the most annoying thing about the language for me.

Currently I have a ruby script that has an enum schema and it prints out golang code for each enum it has all of the constants, an array of all the values, and a function to test if a given object is one of the enum values.

Jason Steinhauser • Jun 4 '18

Strong typing can help minimize or eliminate whole hosts of errors at compile time, as opposed to type-based errors rearing their ugly heads only during testing and production. Things like clojure.spec and TypeScript are a good segue between strong/weak typing. As someone who is functionally inclined, I would imagine you've read some of the reasons that Idris and Haskell were created.

Massimo Artizzu • Jun 4 '18

FYI: there are indeed types existing in JavaScript.

I know that very well. I was hoping that was clear enough... It wasn't the case, apparently 😕

strong types are extremely overrated.

"Extremely", really?
Look, I really like JavaScript and I generally don't mind the lack of typed variables, but a tool for static analysis is indeed quite handy.
Not to mention that with strong types the code can be more easily optimized by the engine, saving a lot of euristic work by the compilers.

A gentle introduction to typed variables as it's done in TypeScript would be great in that sense.

Jason Steinhauser • Jun 4 '18

F# is usually my go-to language, but I was once asked to write something in OCaml. F# is an OCaml derivative, so how hard could it be? It turns out several of the idiosyncrasies made it take longer for me to develop a simple tool. So basically, I dislike the small, yet significant, differences between F#, OCaml, and ReasonML.

Bryan Baldwin • Jun 4 '18

Diphthongs!

maple • Jun 5 '18

javascript "weak typing", not dynamic typing.

Massimo Artizzu • Jun 4 '18

That's easy: there are no types in JavaScript (and it will be like that for a long while).

Clay Stewart • Jun 4 '18

It’s not really the language itself, but the JavaScript Front end framework ecosystem changed A LOT in the past decade, and it was jarring to switch frameworks every two years.

JustinTervala • Jun 4 '18

If Python is going to use whitespace as syntax (good idea) they should only allow either tabs or spaces. You can't mix them, so you get invisible syntax errors.