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'Pragmatic Programmer' Author Andy Hunt Loves Arduino, Hates JavaScript (bestprogrammingbooks.com)
Andy Hunt is one of the 17 software developers who wrote the Agile Manifesto, and he co-authored The Pragmatic Programmer. Now Slashdot reader cerberusss writes:
In an interview with Best Programming Books, Andy Hunt mentions he "hates languages that introduce accidental complexity, such as JavaScript -- what a nightmare of pitfalls for newbies and even seasoned developers... My go-to languages are still Ruby for most things, or straight C for systems programming, Pi or Arduino projects." Furthermore, he mentions that "I tend to do more experimenting and engineering than pure code writing, so there's occasionally some soldering involved ;). Code is just one tool of many."
Andy writes that he also likes Elixir, talks about Agile, reveals how he survived his most challenging project, and says the biggest advancement in programming has been the open source movement. ("Imagine trying to study chemistry, but the first half of the elements were patent-protected by a major pharma company and you couldn't use them...") And he also answered an interesting follow-up question on Twitter: "Do you feel validated in an age of Node and GitHub? Some of your best chapters (scripting and source control) are SOP now!"
Andy's reply? "We've made some great progress, for sure. But there's much to be done still. E.g., You can't ship process."
Andy writes that he also likes Elixir, talks about Agile, reveals how he survived his most challenging project, and says the biggest advancement in programming has been the open source movement. ("Imagine trying to study chemistry, but the first half of the elements were patent-protected by a major pharma company and you couldn't use them...") And he also answered an interesting follow-up question on Twitter: "Do you feel validated in an age of Node and GitHub? Some of your best chapters (scripting and source control) are SOP now!"
Andy's reply? "We've made some great progress, for sure. But there's much to be done still. E.g., You can't ship process."
Original submitter here... I just came here to compliment the editor (EditorDavid). This is my first time submitting and thought my summary was pretty good. But EditorDavid just went above and beyond, extending it with stuff from Twitter, couple of sentences on Andy Hunt's work ethic cetera.
It's been tradition to hate at the editors here, but this time I have to hand it to them, compliments are in order.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I think the issue is that "clean" is in the eye of the beholder. It looks very different in OOP than it does in FP, both of which are pretty well supported paradigms in JS. Seems like the real argument is that JS doesn't make these decisions for you, so you don't get much guidance. That's certainly a speedbump, but it's also a feature, in that it is eminently flexible in the face of new paradigms.