All great code started out as a shitty work-around that happened to work.

(I say this as someone with one of the more prestigious pedigrees in “not writing shit code”. All the theory I’ve learned helps, but at the end of the day the most important qualities of a line of code are: whether it got the job done, and whether is was obviously correct enough that the next developer left it alone.)

At this point I think there is no software dev topic that is somehow not devisive.

Now I want to try something:

“Boolean variables don’t suck.”

Wow. “peak shareholder value” is what I shall now call “multiple inheritance”, from now on.

Thanks. I hate it.

I consider myself a collector of programming anti-patterns, but I didn’t have this one yet.

I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.

They did.

And when errors were highlighted in the code rather than console output.

Yep.

And when high-level languages started appearing.

And yes.

That said, if you believed my mentors, we were barelling towards a 2025 in which nothing running on software ever really worked reliably.

So they may have been grumpy, but they were also right, on that point.

And, does it know how to discern genuine user input from astroturfed marketing copy in disguise?

That’s the beauty of it, it lends legitimacy to the astroturfing campaign. That’s a feature, not a bug, in the eyes of folks trying to maximally enshitify and push their shit products anyway.

Tell me about “Why do you think you wanted to run ELIXA on a Times/Sinclair 2968?”.

It was running on venture capital, betting that giving away search for free would drive Yahoo, WebCrawler, Alta Vista, and all the others out of business, leaving Google free to monopolize and enshittify.

Luckily, it’s illegal to sell products below what they cost in the United States, so that didn’t happen.

Edit: Shit. I keep forgetting when I’m posting in this timeline. We got “Cats” the CGI musical in this one, too, right?! Did we at least get the butthole version here?

More frequent updates means more version mismatches and more trouble to modders and server hosters to have to constantly update.

Yep. As someone who hosts servers and writes mods, I’ve moved over to MineTest for exactly that reason.

This is the part that’s boggling my mind.

1. Stored guns in an oven.
2. Stored guns loaded.

But not content to stop there:

3. Stored loaded guns, inside an oven.

I setup a mail forward, and check the ‘to’ address to all incoming messages for about a year.

Some other good answers already but here’s a sound byte version:

It’s currently expensive to borrow money, and then the borrowed money isn’t as useful as it used to be.

People will assume you work on Cybersecurity.

Edit: Also, people will use this method to verify an email is from you.

Ditto. I use Go for this kind of thing.

“BOM”

Lol. Two things can both be bad.

If YAML and JSON were gripping my hands for dear life, dangling off of a cliff…

I would let both drop into the abyss so I could spend more time with INI.

would Python really be better if it switched to braces?

Yes. A thousand times, yes.

That is amazing.

I don’t know what I just read.

If my website ever gets married, I’m going to invite this website to stand next to it as a bridesmaid - because it makes my website look pretty by comparison.

Don’t worry! Mullets never went away.

The public lost faith, but the truly committed have kept the tradition/style/lifestyle alive.

But I do hope it’s true about the 80s coming back. I’m gonna buy a Trapper Keeper and start saving up for a fresh Pog collection.