I haven’t done much low level stuff, but I think the ‘main’ function is something the compiler uses to establish an entry point for the compiled binary. The name ‘main’ would not exist in the compiled binary at all, but the function itself would still exist. Executable formats aren’t all the same, so they’ll have different ways of determining where this entry point function is expected to be. You can ‘run’ a binary library file by invoking a function contained therein, which is how DLL files work.

Yeah, he was bamboozled as soon as he agreed to allow multiple separate files. The challenge was bs from the start, but he could have at least nailed it down with more explicit language and by forbidding any exceptions. I think it’s kind of ironic that the instructions for a challenge related to different representations of information failed themselves to actually convey the intended information.

Yeah but like, what new features do apps have which weren’t available in those times? Embedded videos maybe? Doesn’t justify the bloat.

I used to think C# was like Java but with fresh ideas. I still do, but Kotlin gives it a run for its money. The type system is pretty great. For example, you can use the Elvis operator to return early if something is null, allowing you to use a non-null type afterwards. In C#, nullable annotations feel more “grafted on”, and there are some weird quirks and footguns that Kotlin avoids by being a little smarter about it.

You might enjoy learning vanilla js and making a site with as few deps as you can get away with. Or a lightweight framework like svelte or preact. The browser stack is definitely some weird shit but it’s still somewhat approachable if you dig under the abstractions that most web devs never venture beyond. It definitely helped me cut through all the manufactured noise.

Good riddance, I say. Web dev is infested with layers upon layers of tools that attempt to abstract what is already fairly simple and straightforward to work with. We’re beyond the days of needing to build buttons out of small image fragments, and JS is (slowly) becoming more livable in its raw form. I welcome anything that keeps the toolchain as simple as possible.

As someone who works with typescript daily, you’re not wrong. It’s an extremely overcomplicated glorified linter that tries and mostly succeeds in catching basic type errors. But it also provides false confidence when you concoct something that shows no errors but doesn’t behave how you expect.

At least until it gets direct dom manipulation and multithreading…

There’s nothing quite like the unique pain of navigating an unfamiliar codebase that treats abstraction as free and lines of code in one place as expensive. It’s like reading a book with only one sentence per page, how are you supposed to understand the full context of anything??

They probably got stuff done, just not the things you left half implemented code for…

Software devs in general seem to have a hard time with balance. No comments or too many comments. Not enough abstraction or too much, overly rigid or loose coding standards, overoptimizing or underoptimizing. To be fair it is difficult to get there.

Maybe the word “audit” is incorrect? If they didn’t provide you any guidelines, I’d definitely recommend asking. But it’s possible they’re just looking for your perspective on best practices and possible improvement ideas, more like a general code review.

Interesting, yeah. I inherited a Blazor project though and have nothing positive to say about it really. Some of it is probably implementation, but it’s a shining example of how much better it is to choose the right tool for the job, rather than reinventing the wheel. For a while I was joking about setting the whole project “ablazor” until we finally decided to go back to a React/C# ASP.NET stack. If you’re thinking of using Blazor still, though, I think two fun things to look into are “linting issues with Blazor” and “Blazor slow”. I’ve heard people praise it, but they tend to be those who consider themselves backend devs that occasionally get stuck making frontends.

The problem with modern UI design in a nutshell…

I often interact with people who don’t like something but haven’t used it before, so I’m definitely going to steal your term “informed dislike” to distinguish between those cases and ones that are legit gripes.

I use Vscode with markdown preview, with a git repo. The only downside is that Windows incessantly wants to group instances of an application, so it’s hard to keep my notes separate from my coding stuff.

I wrote a json prettifier a couple months ago with just a couple lines of code. I thought it would take a while but ended up taking like 10 minutes.

Just ordered a copy!

This is the book that started it all for me 5 years ago. Now I’m a software engineer!

Idk, I don’t see a problem with saying a new language is unintuitive. For example, in js I still consider the horrible type coercion and the “fix” with the triple-equals very unintuitive indeed. On the flip side, when learning C# I found the multiple ways of making comparisons to be pretty intuitive, and not footguns.