It is no secret that Javascript isn't the most well-designed language, and these points have probably been made a billion times, but now it's my turn! Note that this isn't a criticism about a lack of expressiveness. You can create great things with javascript. But you can also footgun yourself very easily, which is what I'm criticizing there. Most languages are expressive, but good ones help you avoid mistakes instead of making them. You can pass more or fewer arguments... full post»

Recently, I've been interested in designing software to make hard-to-find bugs reveal themselves at compile-time. An idea I've read about (I forgot where) that I found fascinating is the use of a special type for IDs in objects that represent database rows. Problem For example, there may be a User table and a Posts table in the database, with each post belonging to one user. Each of these would be mapped to a class/struct in the programming language. Perhaps each... full post»