tomasekeli

Singer of songs. Teller of tales. Lover of, well, a woman, a very nice one. Quaffer of beer. Bearded bard.

i have stopped using upper and lower-case in my writings. i think they're mostly unnecessary and just a bit pretentious. i see the irony in calling the “normal” pretentious, but why should we put some big letters in at certain times? there are a set of arbitrary rules (that vary by language), but i just don't see the reason.

i don't mind reading text in “normal-case” and i don't mind reading “lower-case”, but i do mind ALL UPPER CASE. this might be because it feels like shouting to me? when i use casing in my writings now i do it for specific reasons. it might be to reference code with casing, to emphasise something or just to be clearer in the very few cases where i feel it adds something.

i'm not 100% consistent (i don't believe consistency is all that important anyway), and particularly in letters and texts where it seems important to be overly formal. you know, text where there's not supposed to be a person writing it. i don't like that kind of text, and try to write as little of it as possible.

one consequence of this (or maybe it was what lead me toward it) is adopting a casing-style in my coding that does not use the common Foo.Method() and int SomeIntValue -conventions. i prefer to use snake_casing_in_my_code. casing of method-names, fields, parameters and variables are what programmers fight over. i'm not fighting over this, it's not worth getting in a conflict over. but, i do have my preferences.

it also bothers me that computer-stuff (like programming-languages) are set up to treat these as different. why would i ever want to have two methods Foo.MethodOne() and Foo.methodOne() and they are different methods? that is a recipe for disaster!

but, even worse are case-sensitive file-names. i have spent too many of my few and irrecoverable hours on earth looking for obscure errors that turned out to be /Some/Path/To/Some/File.json that should have been /Some/Path/to/Some/File.json or similar. i know the characters T and t are different things to a computer, but FILE NAMES ARE NOT FOR THE COMPUTER.

see what i did there? i used capitals to emphasise. that's cool.

i'm a software developer, i translate my understanding of needs into something a computer can understand. it's a good job. it is challenging, interesting, fun and rewarding. it also means that i am one of the last people between automation and the world.

this means that i have a responsibility to the world. most people in the world cannot make the computers do what they want them to. this is not just about ability, it is about access and privilege. i am in a privileged position and i can affect how some systems actually work.

software development is a complex thing, and how we decide what changes to make is surprisingly complicated and convoluted. there are entire schools of thought, practices and and lots of tools attending to how we change software systems. there are hierarchies involved.

but, in the end, it comes down to a few people typing things into computers and telling the computers how to do something. and this is where it stops – this is where the responsibility finally ends up. the people who actually make the software are responsible for [edit: the consequences of] that software.

we have lots of structures and rules to dissipate and distance ourselves from the effects of our software, but in the end we are responsible. we see this with e.g. the volkswagen emmissions scandal where the company has certainly acted badly, but the developers who made software in question are being held responsible as well.

yes, there are consequences to shirking our responsibility to the community and world. as well there should be.

for evil to happen many people must be willing to let it happen. in the end it is up to the person actually writing the code.

i enjoy that the traditional greeting we make when first testing out or demonstrating a new programming language, framework or tool is "hello world"

i don't like it because it is quaint and desperately ambitious; i like it because it is delightfully buggy

by my count any program that does nothing other than print this phrase has 4 bugs:

  1. by common conventions of english (that i have now grown too old to care much about) the first letter in a sentence should be a capital.
  2. the “world” is used here as a name, and should therefore also be captialised
  3. there should be a comma between hello and world
  4. to me this looks like an exclamation and it should have an exclamation-mark at the end

to be fair i've seen the bugfixed version of this phrase, "Hello, World!" often enough as well – but i find it delightful that the most common implementation tends to be something like:

public static void main(string[] args)
{
    System.Console.WriteLine("hello world");
}