The JS Frameworks always feel fun to start with, but then I always end up realising how complex and flakey the tool chain is and switch to something simpler.

ASP.NET + alpine.js is my current happy place. If I need a JS lib then I get it from unpkg.com and avoid npm.

Then Docker on a Digital Ocean Container App is a really easy way to CI/CD.

Right now my go to stack is go, tailwind, templ and htmx. The whole stack works really well :)

No it doesn't, the units remain the same. Only legibility changes. Style doesn't affect semantics.

I think we have to think of software like books and writing. It is about conveying information, and while there are grammatical rules to language and conventions around good and bad writing, we're generally happy to leave it there because too many rules is so constructive as to remove the ability to express information in the way we feel we need to. We just have to accept that some are better writers than others, or we like the style of some authors better.

That would make sense if code was written solely for the enjoyment of its readers, but it isn't.

Code uses text, sometimes even natural-language prose, but isn't like "books and writing". It has to communicate knowledge, not feels. It also ultimately have to be precise enough to give unambiguous instructions to a machine.

In this sense, code is like mathematical proofs and like architectural blueprints, which is a different category to drawings, paintings and literature. One is about shared, objective, precise understanding of a problem. The other is about sharing subjective, emotional experiences; having the audience understand the work, much less everyone understand it the same way, is not required, usually not possible, and often undesirable.

Removing software engineers from the software development loop ultimately requires ceding control of the detail in our software systems.

ChatGPT o1 preview is producing amazing results for code and generally helpful with life. It's not well integrated to many IDE tools yet (I use Cody a bit which has a wait list for o1 preview), but then I keep going back to just using the ChatGPT interface anyway because it feels cleaner to manually select and upload the relevant files attachments anyway. I'm sure that will change as integrations improve. Claude seems really popular on here but I wonder if that's just because Sonnet is free and useful enough. I prefer the results of newer ChatGPT models currently and feel they are worth paying for.

It's about the journey, not the destination ...

The inverse of 2 * 0 = 0 would be 2 / 0 = 0, not 0 / 0 = 2

Notepad++ has been one of the first things I install on a new Windows machine every time since I started my programming career 17 years ago. VSCode is everywhere but I still reach for Notepad++ for single file editing (this has always felt awkward in VSCode, maybe two editors is just easier to mentally separate). Would love to see a native Linux / Mac version. Will it ever happen?

Yep there's no native Linux/Mac version. That's why I switched to CudaText, which is Sublime-like.

I used to use Notepad++ but eventually switched to Vim (specifically gvim on windows). I used vim for everything for a while before switching to vscode for code editing and vim for one-off file editing. It's really handy knowing how to use Vim proficiently since it has some really powerful features.

I did also begin programming with Notepad++. I thank it to exist, it introduced me to the cool capabilities an editor can have, and it's a very good starting point for a text editor. But now I gained experience, for quick edits or small projects alongside jetbrains/VS code, I switched to Sublime Text as it as all the functionnalities of Notepad++ and more. It fits perfectly my needs.

JS frameworks seem inevitable. Any time I've worked with native JS in a reasonable size projects, it becomes necessary to create libraries and common conventions, that starts to look like something approaching a small framework. A framework is just common patterns for solving problems. I think what a lot of developers object to is the stack of build tools required to transpile, bundle and link code together when using these frameworks, in addition to the complexity that comes with dependency management, rather than the use of the framework themselves.

Alpine.js would have been a better recommendation according to the authors advice as it is straight forward JS plus HTML attributes.