Coding Hot Takes

[lilpaladin1]

I'm fairly sure this retro themed forum filled with furries have a lot of coders amongst the userbase, so why not start a thread talking about some hot takes that revolve around coding.

I'll start:
I think people can be too anal about magic numbers sometimes. I'm not calling random ass numbers good, in fact I do like it when numbers are explained as variables, but I feel like sometimes an unexplained number in a function can be explained by hovering over the function in the ide or text editor and seeing what the parameters are called. Plus sometimes the parameter has different numbers when called multiple times so having to declare constants for that can ironically make it more confusing as you'd have to go back and forth going "ok what's the number of this constant again". It's a balance thing.

[NovaSquirrel]

In communities where assembly language is prominent I see a lot of people be very vocally against the use of macros. They can cause problems for beginners and make it difficult for them to get help with or fully understand the code they've written, but people talk as if all assembly programmers are beginners? Though I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the people in those communities that try to help out and give advice haven't actually like, had real experience making games.

My position is that when you're not a beginner and you can remember what the macros you make actually stand for, they're extremely helpful for reducing the amount of mental load involve with assembly language programming, and they make it easier to think in a more abstract way with less noise. More importantly (and this is a benefit I don't think you'll really realize until you do actual complex projects), you can have an optimization in the code that can change itself based on changes elsewhere in the program, without having to go through the whole program and change every instance of the optimization to suit the new needs (like a new layout for a data structure, or new constants). Game development calls for rapid iteration as you adjust the game design, and the tooling you use needs to accommodate that.

[beeps]

Using JavaScript is good actually.

Not the way that probably-too-many websites use it, where it's required to do virtually anything or make anything work. That sucks and is bad.

But JavaScript itself is fine. CSS hacks based on hovers and focus states and checkboxes are often not as accessible as using JavaScript, and JavaScript was literally designed for building UI behaviours, use it for its job!

JS being loosely duck typed is also a good thing when you realise that its initial role was entirely for UI behaviours. When everything in the HTML DOM is a string, of course you want the only language that can interact with it to change the types of variables according to need.

[NovaSquirrel]

Using JavaScript is good actually.

I remember you managed to nudge me into going ahead and using JavaScript where it's a good fit on a previous forum. That and also realizing that my phone was having trouble with CSS tabs. Of course I'm still making sure the site isn't just totally broken without scripting, like using a media query to change the layout into a single column with section headings if it can't have JavaScript tabs.

[hanalei]

This is probably a lukewarm take in the grand scheme of things, but I remain convinced that it's almost never a good idea to omit parentheses, even when the language's syntax explicitly allows for it.

Case in point: Ruby's syntax is extremely forgiving. You don't need parentheses surrounding the arguments to a method in many cases. But that doesn't give you permission to use parentheses as little as possible. I'm a longtime Rubyist (15+ years experience), but this example bogs me down as a reader largely due to the lack of parentheses.

TL;DR: As a reader AND as a writer of code, I don't want to ever have to rely upon knowledge of operator precedence. Just use extra parentheses to spell out what you mean!