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;DR blame the dev (programming.dev)

Post:

If you’re still shipping load‑bearing code in C, C++, Python, or vanilla JavaScript in 2025, you’re gambling with house money and calling it “experience.”

As systems scale, untyped or foot‑gun‑heavy languages don’t just get harder to work with—they hit a complexity cliff. Every new feature is another chance for a runtime type error or a memory bug to land in prod. Now layer LLM‑generated glue code on top of that. More code, more surface area, less anyone truly understands. In that world, “we’ll catch it in tests” is wishful thinking, not a strategy.

We don’t live in 1998 anymore. We have languages that:

  • Make whole classes of bugs unrepresentable (Rust, TypeScript)
  • Give you memory safety and concurrency sanity by default (Rust, Go)
  • Provide static structure that both humans and LLMs can lean on as guardrails, not red tape

At this point, choosing C/C++ for safety‑critical paths, or dynamic languages for the core of a large system, isn’t just “old school.” It’s negligence with better marketing.

Use Rust, Go, or TypeScript for anything that actually matters. Use Python/JS at the edges, for scripts and prototypes.

For production, load‑bearing paths in 2025 and beyond, anything else is you saying, out loud:

“I’m okay with avoidable runtime failures and undefined behavior in my critical systems.”

Are you?

Comment:

Nonsense. If your code has reached the point of unmaintainable complexity, then blame the author, not the language.

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[-] echodot@feddit.uk 8 points 8 hours ago

So there is apparently a problem with languages such as JavaScript and the solution is to use languages such as TypeScript.

Wut?

[-] pelya@lemmy.world 26 points 15 hours ago

TypeScript and safety-critical paths should not be in one sentence.

[-] mEEGal@lemmy.world 3 points 12 hours ago

wut ?

Why ?

Genuinely curious to learn from your arguments

[-] pelya@lemmy.world 14 points 11 hours ago

It's Javascript with types. You are still using one hundred NPM packages to do the simplest thing. Any string can be JSON. And Node is single-threaded, so if you plan to create some kind of parallel computation, you'd need to run 16 Docker containers of your Node server, one per CPU core, with NGINX or some other load balancer at the business end, and hope that your database engine won't reorder transactions. And yeah, Docker is mandatory, because Node version in your latest Ubuntu release is already outdated.

[-] sheepishly@fedia.io 17 points 16 hours ago

don't just m-dash

chat gippity

[-] Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 13 hours ago

Don't just state—regurgitate!

[-] chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 16 hours ago

Maybe, but always remember LLMs are trained on real people. Some people naturally use similar styles to some LLM tica as it was stolen from them in the first place.

[-] Atlas_@lemmy.world 17 points 19 hours ago

Go and Python and Typescript all have their own footguns.

I assume Rust is the same, but haven't used it personally to see

[-] danhab99@programming.dev 13 points 16 hours ago

Rust is the foot gun, it's so perfect that you genuinely cannot just sit down and type out what you need.

[-] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 48 points 23 hours ago

Just don't do bugs. How hard is that?

[-] Phunter@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 hours ago

If I don't have documentation or defined features, then I can't do bugs!

[-] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 6 points 8 hours ago

According to all teams I've worked on.

Pretty fucking hard.

I know this is satire, But really though better languages that make various classes of defects unrepresentable reduce defects. It's wild that such a statement needs to be made, but our industry is filled with folks who don't critically think about decisions like these.

[-] MIDItheKID@lemmy.world 9 points 17 hours ago

Like the age old advice for getting better at Smash Brothers - Don't get hit.

[-] lemming741@lemmy.world 7 points 18 hours ago

My second favorite prompt, behind "Do not hallucinate"

[-] wer2@lemmy.zip 10 points 18 hours ago

Sounds like they want Ada Spark and not Rust.

[-] Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 58 points 1 day ago

As an embedded dev, good luck not using C

[-] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago

You could use Forth.

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[-] for_some_delta@beehaw.org 17 points 21 hours ago

I don't get it.

Maybe the joke is nothing complex is written in fad languages?

Maybe the joke is the discounting of peer review and testing?

Maybe the joke is the lack of devops knowledge where Python is extra steps over other scripting languages?

It seems like promotion of fad languages. When I was younger, I chased fads and lost hard. I'll stick with C and C++. Run-time failures happen to everyone including fad languages. Here's looking at you Rust CVE's. Better to have loved and lost, something, something.

[-] elkien@lemmy.today 1 points 1 hour ago

Plenty of complex things have been written in fad languages. And not only complex things, COBOL was one of the biggest fad languages of all time.

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 3 points 8 hours ago

I'm completely confused by why they seem to think it's impossible to have coding errors in rust. I'm also confused as to why they seem to think that errors are actually a problem. You get them you fix them. Who cares about what language you do it in.

This stinks of somebody who's been in the industry for about 2 years and now thinks they're hot shit.

[-] Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 36 points 1 day ago

it's just negligence with better marketing

Good damn I hate that tone it reeks of LinkedIn llm-powered personal branding. Weak ideas with writing that tries to sound strong is the worst.

[-] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 7 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Weak ideas with writing that tries to sound strong.

I move to make this the new definition of "Marketing".

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[-] grue@lemmy.world 71 points 1 day ago

Python isn't "untyped;" it is, in fact, strongly-typed. (And is markedly different than and superior to JavaScript on that point.)

This rant feels like it was written by an OO programmer who was never able to wrap his head around functional programming.

[-] expr@programming.dev 4 points 16 hours ago

Why are you talking about functional programming? Python sure as hell isn't FP.

[-] ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 1 points 12 hours ago

You might be confusing using functions with functional programming. Python is Object Oriented language at it's core, most people use it as procedural, and like most modern languages it supports also functional paradigms.

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[-] Shirasho@lemmings.world 99 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

"Blame the author, not the language"

Says the person who screams they have never worked professionally with a team before.

There is no excuse to not use statically typed, safe languages nowadays. There are languages that let you build faster like Python and Typescript, but faster does not mean safer. Even if your code is flawless it still isn't safe because all it takes is a single flawed line of code. The more bug vectors you remove the better the language is.

[-] Arkouda@lemmy.ca 69 points 1 day ago

Even if your code is flawless it still isn’t safe because all it takes is a single flawed line of code.

If there is a single flawed line of code, the code isn't flawless.

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[-] jonathan7luke@lemmy.zip 103 points 1 day ago

I'm not even going to bother commenting on that train wreck of a post, but I just wanted to mention that I hate the writing style of programming-related LinkedIn posts. They're just chock-full of sweeping generalizations presented as absolute truth in an extremely patronizing tone.

Why can't people just say, "In my opinion, X technology is a better fit for Y situation for Z reason," instead of "Every time you encounter X, you must do Y, otherwise you're dead wrong."

It's just simultaneously so arrogant and also aggressively ignorant. If someone spoke to me like that in real life, I would never want to speak with them again. And these people are broadcasting this shit to their entire professional network.

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[-] thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 7 points 20 hours ago

I half way agree. I always say form shapes function. Sure you can write good code in any language. But some encourage it more then others. Ultimately it's the programmer fault when things get over complex though

[-] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Honestly, I more than half agree because the factor most seem to conveniently ignore is that languages and environments that encourage better and safer code are aimed at the lowest common denominator.

The lowest common denominator of developers are the ones that benefit the most from a reduction in defects or unsafe code they may produce. They are the biggest pool of developers. And in my experience, the ones least likely to proactively take measures to reduce defect rates unless it's forced upon them and/or baked into their environment.

They are the ones that will slap any in typescript to resolve errors instead of actually resolving them, or the ones that will use dynamic in C# instead of actually fixing the bad design ... etc

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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
360 points (95.5% liked)

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