Some examples of common cultural (that is, completely avoidable) antipatterns:
- LISP dialect devs insisting on using incredibly obscure technical abbreviations for important names, like car/cadr/cdr instead of first/second/rest or something else human readable.
- POSIX-ish shell standardizers and builders making it really difficult to deal with anything but ASCII alphanumeric filenames. Saying "You shouldn't put special characters in filenames!" isn't helpful if I'm trying to make a script to support other people's filenames.
- C-style language makers' insistence on terminating statements with semicolon, so that a tiny fraction of multi-line statements can be shortened to one line.
- Python devs treating time-zone-less datetimes as not an atrocity, for example in utcnow.
- Nix, well, being generally incredibly hard to read and learn, even after about 20 other languages. I hope somebody goes ham on that language and creates a thoroughly backwards incompatible implementation of the fantastic ideas behind it.
I guess I've pissed off the entire internet now, but remember that these are my gripes, not some absolute truths I'm trying to convince y'all of.
- LISP dialect devs insisting on using incredibly obscure technical abbreviations for important names, like car/cadr/cdr instead of first/second/rest or something else human readable.
- POSIX-ish shell standardizers and builders making it really difficult to deal with anything but ASCII alphanumeric filenames. Saying "You shouldn't put special characters in filenames!" isn't helpful if I'm trying to make a script to support other people's filenames.
- C-style language makers' insistence on terminating statements with semicolon, so that a tiny fraction of multi-line statements can be shortened to one line.
- Python devs treating time-zone-less datetimes as not an atrocity, for example in utcnow.
- Nix, well, being generally incredibly hard to read and learn, even after about 20 other languages. I hope somebody goes ham on that language and creates a thoroughly backwards incompatible implementation of the fantastic ideas behind it.
I guess I've pissed off the entire internet now, but remember that these are my gripes, not some absolute truths I'm trying to convince y'all of.