Absolutely.
I’ve seen so many projects hindered by bad decisions around performance. Big things like shoehorning yourself into an architecture, language, or particular tool, but even small things like assuming the naive approach is unacceptably slow. If you never actually measure anything though, your assumptions are just assumptions.
What? The GPL would have offered no more protection for this exact scenario than the LGPL (or any other license for that matter).
Null is terrible.
A lot of languages have it available as a valid return value for most things, implicitly. This also means you have to do extra checking or something like this will blow up with an exception:
// java example
// can throw exception
String address = person.getAddress().toUpperCase();
// safe
String address = "";
if (person.getAddress() != null) {
person.getAddress().toUpperCase();
}
There are a ton of solutions out there. Many languages have added null-coalescing and null-conditional operators – which are a shorthand for things like the above solutions. Some languages have removed the implicit nulls (like Kotlin), requiring them to be explicitly marked in their type. Some languages have a wrapper around nullable values, an Option type. Some languages remove null entirely from the language (I believe Rust falls into this, using an option type in place of).
Not having null isn’t particularly common yet, and isn’t something languages can just change due to breaking backwards compatibility. However, languages have been adding features over time to make nulls less painful, and most have some subset of the above as options to help.
I do think Option types are fantastic solutions, making you deal with the issue that a none/empty type can exist in a particular place. Java has had them for basically 10 years now (since Java 8).
// optional example
Class Person {
private String address;
//prefer this if a null could ever be returned
public Optional<String> getAddress() {
return Optional.ofNullable(address);
}
// not this
public String getAddress() {
return address;
}
When consuming, it makes you have to handle the null case, which you can do a variety of ways.
// set a default
String address = person.getAddress().orElse("default value");
// explicitly throw an exception instead of an implicit NullPointerException as before
String address = person.getAddress().orElseThrow(SomeException::new);
// use in a closure only if it exists
person.getAddress().ifPresent(addr -> logger.debug("Address {}", addr));
// first example, map to modify, and returning default if no value
String address = person.getAddress().map(String::toUpperCase).orElse("");
While so many things are so much better than they used to be in the programming ecosystem, I feel like entry-level GUI programming is so much worse.
This will probably be an unpopular opinion, but Visual Basic (pre .NET) was one of the easiest ways to make a simple, contemporary (for the time) GUI. Drag and drop some elements, modify the UI properties, double click and add code. It made for an excellent introduction to programming because the UI portions were simple and intuitive enough to stay out of the way.
The rest of VB wasn’t great. Weird language/syntax/keywords keywords, closed environment, mediocre tooling. But for building UIs? I haven’t used anything as easy as that and it’s been over 20 years now…
I don’t have any recommendations unfortunately. Almost everything I do is web based or command line. Web UIs aren’t terrible, but there’s a learning curve and lots of limitations. Haven’t found anything for desktop apps I like lately (last one I built was also with tkinter for a small Python project. Bleh.)
Bill is a liability.
Project Panama is aimed at improving the integration with native code. Not sure when it will be “done”, but changes are coming.
Based on some places I used to work, upper management seemed convinced that the “idea” stage was the hardest and most important part of any project, and that the easy part is planning, gathering requirements, building, testing, changing, and maintaining custom business applications for needlessly complex and ever changing requirements.