firelizzard

Reposted from Hacker News, it was #6 when I looked so you may have already seen it but I thought it was worth reposting. I am not the author.

As a senior developer, I don't find copilot particularly useful. Maybe it would have been more useful earlier in my career, but at this point writing a prompt to get copilot to regurgitate useful code and massaging the resulting output almost always takes as much or more time as it would for me just to write whatever it is I need to write. If I am able to give copilot a sufficiently specific prompt that it can 'solve' my problem for me, I already know how to solve the problem and how to write the code. So all I'm doing is using copilot as a ghost writer instead of writing it myself. And it doesn't seem to be any faster. The autocomplete features are net helpful because they're actually what I want often enough to offset the cost of reading the suggestion and deciding if it's useful. But it's not a huge difference (vs writing it myself) so that by itself is not sufficiently useful to justify paying the cost myself nor sufficient motivation to go to the effort of convincing my employer to pay for it.

I exclusively use Visual Studio Code for editing code. I primarily work with Go, and a little bit with JavaScript/TypeScript, but I need to do some C# work.

I have no interest in using Microsoft's proprietary C# Dev Kit or dealing with their licensing terms. What capabilities am I losing? The marketing materials for the dev kit talk about a lot of stuff that appear to be features of the open source C# extension, so it's unclear which features are actually exclusive to the dev kit.

Why is crypto.subtle.digest designed to return a promise?

Every other system I've ever worked with has the signature hash(bytes) => bytes, yet whatever committee designed the Subtle Crypto API decided that the browser version should return a promise. Why? I've looked around but I've never found any discussion on the motivation behind that.

Not sure if this is the right community, but I didn't see a general one. What search engine do you use? Besides Google increasingly spying on its users, the quality of its search results seems to have gotten significantly worse over the last decade. What search engine(s) do you use?

I am a self-taught programmer and I do not have imposter syndrome. I have a degree in electrical engineering and when I thought that was going to be my career I did have imposter syndrome, so I'm not immune. I wonder if there's a correlation. It seems that many if not most professionals suffer from imposter syndrome; I wonder if that's related to the way they learned.

When I say self-taught, I don't mean I never took a class, I mean the majority of my programming skill was learned by doing/outside of classes. I took a Java class in high school that helped me graduate from procedural languages to OOP, and I took classes in college but with few exceptions the ones that were practical (vs theoretical) covered material I already knew.

My last job was at a company that designed and built satellites to order. There was a well defined process for this, and systems engineers were a big part of it. Maybe my experience there is distorting my perspective, but it seems to me that any sufficiently complex project needs to include systems engineering, even if the person doing that is not called a systems engineer. Yet as far as I can tell, it isn't really a thing in the software industry. When I look at job postings and "about us" blog posts about how a company operates, I don't see systems engineering mentioned. Am I just not seeing it, is it called something else, or is the majority of the industry somehow operating without it?

I am not hating on Rust. I am honestly looking for reasons why I should learn and use Rust. Currently, I am a Go developer. I haven’t touched any other language for years, except JavaScript for occasional front end work and other languages for OSS contributions.

After working with almost every mainstream language over the years and flitting between them on a whim, I have fallen in love with Go. It feels like ‘home’ to me - it’s comfortable and I enjoy working with it and I have little motivation to use anything else. I rage every time I get stuck working with JavaScript because dependency management is pure hell when dealing with the intersection of packages and browsers - by contrast, dependency management is a breeze with Go modules. I’ll grant that it can suck when using private packages, but I everything I work on is open.

Rust is intriguing. Controlling the lifecycle of variables in detail appeals to me. I don’t mind garbage collectors but Rust’s approach seems far more elegant. The main issue for me is the syntax, specifically generic types, traits, and lifetimes. It looks just about as bad as C++'s template system, minus the latter’s awful compiler errors. After working almost exclusively with Go for years, reading it seems unnecessarily demanding. And IMO the only thing more important than readability is whether it works.

Why should I learn and use rust?

P.S.: I don’t care about political stuff like “Because Google sucks”. I see no evidence that Google is controlling the project. And I’m not interested in “Because Go sucks” opinions - it should be obvious that I disagree.