I took great pains last week to convert a big python project to make it typed. (shoutout to MonkeyType)
It's so much nicer to develop now...
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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Oh that's a neat library. Type annotations in python are really nice, and you don't have to add tooling like when you switch from JS to TS.
Yeah, I stopped developing in JS for good ~1.5 years ago. After using TS, it seems crazy to go back.
Empty string used to be like my own version of null pointer.
Oh, you worked at Oracle by any chance?
Dark times…
Like -1 for an Int nil value.
easy there satan
Ah, the SQLite approach!
Me: Puts a boolean into sqlite
Me: Asks for that boolean
SQLite: "Here's that int you asked for"
It is also the bash approach, isn't it?!
Also, Tcl (a cute little scripting language from the 90s, best known for giving the world the Tk UI toolkit; it was somewhat Lispy, only under the hood, worked like sh, where everything was a string).
more directly, sqlite was originally for tcl which is why they share the semantics.
also I'd argue that sqlite is a bigger contribution than tk, but I suppose in a more roundabout way
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God, I'm so over SQL.
It's great, but it is so old and shows it. Feels like 99% of my SQL queries are just cheese.
Works though, and quick.
SQL is the only bedrock in my entire career. Its the one thing that has stayed relevant.
SQL is great but when you start having issues processing what is actually going on, its fine to pull out what you need and throw another language on top (python, C#, etc...etc...). Getting it to work slow is one step in making it fast again.
Yeah it's curious that it hasn't really undergone some major changes or had some major challengers (except NoSQL I guess).
Its been a while but yeah NoSQL was the closest.
I remember a good 4-5 years where developers all around me were using couchdb, mongodb, and a host of others. mostly json in <-> json out kind of systems. And VERY hard to maintain after the initial TODO. I remember so much debugging and finding out old records didnt have a way to deal with changes in the "tables" or equivalents. It was maddening.
Dont get me wrong, it did create some really awesome specialty tools but you cant really get around ACID compliance when dealing with databases.
I think SQL has some awesome properties that keep it going:
- Most major distributions are rock solid stable.
- Its optimized and fast for data.
- Its understandable to many types of industries. Software development is only the start.
- Its integrated with everything already. So ODBCs can just plug and play most of the time.
- Its the devil we know. ACID, transactions, etc... are all things we know about and are proven to work very well. Definitly when you need to MAKE SURE a thing made its way into the system.
Yeah 100% with you, had this mongo database where the first entry was like a description, the nr 2 and on the actual data. I mean if there were a description... Sometes 2 descriptions...
Why oh why.
And for sure SQL is kind of the cement of DB today, don't get me wrong, I like that what I learned yesterday actually still works, I'm just pondering the fact that it is so.
Maybe SQL isn't the hip language so people doesn't try to reinvent it all the time 😁
It has though
Window functions were an addition, but more recently struct, json, and array fields with native support. Pipe syntax is getting multiple implementations.
Match recognize is a whole new standard abstraction of window functions.
Union by name is being added (fuck union by position).
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They finally added strict tables which avoids most (all?) of those shenanigans.
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I am strongly strongly statically typed pilled and I will not apologize.
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void*
We don't touch that unless we really know what we're doing.
God, that reminds me of the debate on XML that I had with a developer about fifteen years ago.
Both our companies were working for a client who needed to publish product catalogues in several languages twice a year.
They had implemented a sort of Content Management System which they used with a plugin to feed data into Quark Xpress files as well as their website, IIRC. Cross-media publishing, essentially, and they had their own little set of format instructions to make words appear in bold, different colors, etc.
Since my company was tasked with translating the text into various languages, I suggested they come up with a way to store their data as XML. The standard tools in the translation industry can be easily customized to work with that, and XML would be a good way to future-proof their software. After a lot of delaying, grumbling, and ho-hum, they agreed to implement this plan.
Lo and behold, when the first meeting on the new XML format came around they showed it to me for the first time and... everything was in CDATA sections. Entire paragraphs of text with proprietary formatting instructions. 😐
When I tried to explain, very politely, and very patiently, that this was not going to work, the lead dev started insulting me. I swear to God, I've never been this close to punching someone in the face at a business meeting. 🤬
Thankfully, the client understood the issue and we eventually got an XML-based data exchange going. It is probably still in use today.
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Everithing is bytes.
The NHL banned the use of 00 as a number in the 95-96 season because they claimed their databases couldn't handle it. They still are fools because this continues to be a banned number to this day.
(i am old) both my brother and i were number 00 in our younger hockey years. we were goalies, so we got first pick of numbers on all new teams we played on, heheheh.
some of you have never programmed in tcl and it shows
I opened a TCL script once. It’s use of uplevel scared me. I’ve never dared to return since.
For those who don’t know: uplevel is a command that goes up one level of the stack frame, and then executes code there. A function can therefore execute code in its callers stack frame.
tcl is pretty fun actually, it's like bash on steroids.
for a preview of the insanity: anything surrounded by "" is a string, with the variable expansion you'd expect. anything surrounded by {} is also a string, but with no expansion. the equivalent in bash is the backtick string. but you don't need to know that to write tcl. if you approach {} as "code blocks" like in other languages, it just works. reason being that tcl evals everything, constantly, attaching little tags to strings that tells the language how things are used, like "this string is an integer" or "this string is code and here is the result from last time it ran". it's madness and, weirdly, robust as hell. Xilinx writes all their tooling in tcl. SQLite started life as a tcl module, and it's still the only api that is not provided by a plugin.
I have. I quickly learned not to.
Tk is overlooked, though. It's not pretty, and its approach is archaic, but it's one of the few GUI toolkits that Just Works on every platform I tried it on with minimum fuss.
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Me, trying to learn flat assembler: "What is even an object?"
Me, as a professional Haskeller: "What is even an object?"
lol I think this when I see “any”
Just use enums
where my Ada bros not committing war crimes at?
Haha! Reminds me when I arrived in a team whose API accepted JSON and all the booleans were "True" or "False" (meaningful case, obv.) That was fun.
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[Laughs in computed TypeScript strings]
at the end of the day everything's a []u8 if you want it to be
This certainly Tcl'd my funny bone.
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