I feel like all the points you raise could be replied by : if you do not like it, no one is forcing you into doing it.

It is my understanding that people do this for fun - to take the occasion to get into a new language and/or exercise their problem resolution skills.

Personally, although I love coding (it is a passion), after a whole day of coding I do not feel the energy to partake in a coding event. And during holidays I am busy doing other stuff. So I do not participate in the Advent of Code. But I am still glad that the event exists for people who enjoy it and have the time for it

Agreed that some people can find it easier with explicit names - however some people find it easier with short meaningless names as it makes them focus on the abstraction rather than the naming. There is no right or wrong here. It all depends on the reader.

A specialized architecture will always be better than a general purpose processor no matter how advanced the tech gets.

So you will always need a GPU as a GPU is quite literally a Graphical Programming Unit, that is a specialised architecture for Graphical computations

A friend of mine got asked if she had a boyfriend. She asked back "why that question". It was to know whether she would be likely to get pregnant and miss work.

What a horrifying mentality some companies have

Hot take: Git is hard for people who do not know how to read a documentation.

The Git book is very easy to read and only takes a couple of hours to read the most significant chapters. That's how I learnt it myself.

Git is meant for developers, i.e. people who are supposed to be good at looking up online how stuff works.

When I first got daily access to internet (back in 2009), I got curious about how programs are built. Like, if I wanted to make my own application, what should I do?

I googled something along that direction and it linked me to a famous french website for learning programming (site du zéro) where I learnt C language.

After the course I made a 2D Snake game with SDL2. How naive was I to think I could write it in one go without testing anything in between! I scrapped the 1st attempt because it was a disaster and randomly inserting/removing * was not helping.

I started again from scratch, testing in smaller steps, and I really liked it. After a couple of weeks I had my Snake game working! I was so proud of it that I showed it to my mom. I do not have the source files anymore but I still have the binary somewhere

Afterwards I sticked with it and continued programming - I was back in school without much access to internet so I programmed on my TI-83+ instead. Eventually I pursued computer science studies then a PhD… It got me hooked real good.

I doubt Elon Musk does programming

Well Ruby does exactly that though. The methods have good documentation so it's easy to find what something does. There is no magic in the language that makes it do something else than what you wrote.

I love Ruby since I got introduced to it. The syntax is great and you can do many things in a simple manner.

Before that, Python was my go-to language for scripting but now I cannot stand the syntax anymore. I dislike the lack of braces and forced indent.

My laptop is about 5 or 6 years old. It's all HDD I have no SSD at all

Yes. My windows takes literally 10 minutes to boot. I am counting here from the moment i press the button to the moment it is usable (when I can run applications and use them). I have a HDD and each time I boot windows services are always looking to update something which starves the other apps. It's really a clog. If I want to use it faster I need to bring up the task manager and kill each update thing one by one until I killed them all.

Program easily and efficiently. Not having to wait 5 minutes for a window to come. Fast boot/reboot times (less than 10 minutes). Native support for many things without having to install them. Installing is usually as easy as running an apt-get command. Not having to kill update processes because they take 100% of your disk bandwidth and starve all your other apps.

Windows feels like an ugly and sloggy system with a ton of duck tapes. Only reason I use it on my gaming laptop is for games.

Linux on the other hand just works. Nothing fancy, but it's just what someone who wants efficiency needs.

If the code base is arcane enough, code reviews won't matter. You just won't understand at all what is happening there. And the "Martin" will probably pressure you to accept anyway by telling the bosses "I can't work, they won't accept my code reviews".

Interesting take. I prefer spaces because each piece of code that I see with tabs has an implicit tabsize you really need to have if you don’t want the code to look ugly - especially if the person has been mixing tabs and spaces - and they usually do. Sometimes unadvertently.

When you remove all tabs at least everyone is on the same page.

To the actual problem raised by the article:

I have ADHD. Two spaces per indent makes it damn near impossible for me to scan code. My brain gets too distracted by the visual noise. Someone who’s visually impaired might bump their font size up really large, and need to scale up or down the amount of space per indent. Someone might just prefer it because…

I wonder if it could be possible to adjust the “indent number of spaces you see” in code editors. Code editors are able to figure out what are indents and what are not, so in theory it should be possible. Perhaps that would be an idea for a new feature?

Then you have to ask yourself, is it worth it to add yet another function that can crash your program if misused just for that 10% in a situation where they might not even matter

C/C++ already exposes a ton of undefined behaviors: it is part of the language to give full control to the programmer. If you want a language that minimizes the number of undefined behaviors you can get into, C/C++ is not the right candidate anyway. Something like Ada or Rust is much more relevant for that.

So I would say yes, just as long as it is properly documented.

We need to choose something which most closely represents the data.

Why do you need to do that? You do not have to choose the optimal memory model to code a Tic Tac Toe game.

A Vec works fine, and is also simple to understand (so it is maintainable).

If you invent your own complex data structure for the Tic Tac Toe you trade maintainability for… what gain?

How to build a grid whose orientation does not matter?

The orientation is how you iterate on your grid. If you iterate from first element to last element on X-axis, you have the “normal” orientation. If you iterate from last to first, you have the Y-symmetrical orientation.

A 2D array is already a grid whose orientation does not matter. No need to over-complexify this.

If you want to be picky, you could say that you want a grid with optimal performance. Meaning that your data should be contiguous (ideally, your data should be in the same cache line to prevent cache misses).

If you start playing with complex data structures with lots of pointer indirections and such, your performance will go down, your code will be more complex to understand, and will (certainly) be bigger in memory. You will lose in both maintainability, performance and size.

A single vector of 9 elements is enough, really.