Programming

Myth: You are lazy.

Truth: It's highly probable you are neurodivergent.

While, accurate numbers are not available, I have seen people estimating that 20% of people working in FAANG are neurodivergent. If coding comes naturally to you but the laundry is your mortal enemy, it's worth learning about ADHD/ASD and other common disorders. Being a coder can be a sign, the immediate feedback helps a bunch of us, or as Russel Barkely says "when you solve a problem on a paper, NOTHING HAPPENS".

Edit: Rephrase.

That “just changing a word” is easy and quick. A codebase is an iceberg. Management only really typically understands the surface, but there is a disproportionate amount of ice under the water.

I had to change all instances of a label from a word to an abbreviation. Because we don’t have i18n set up in the app, it ended up affecting 55 different files. I did my best to consolidate into everything calling a common function, but it’s far from perfect. 55 files changed because management said “oh this word here should be shorter”.

It's not magic

That Python is the most readable language. Merely forcing an indentation style is only part of the issue. Python programmers have a tendency to write a bunch of named parameters all on one line, and it's a mess.

Even the automated documentation can't make it right. What the hell is this shit?

class werkzeug.test.EnvironBuilder(path='/', base_url=None, query_string=None, method='GET', input_stream=None, content_type=None, content_length=None, errors_stream=None, multithread=False, multiprocess=False, run_once=False, headers=None, data=None, environ_base=None, environ_overrides=None, mimetype=None, json=None, auth=None)

This is not enlightening. It might as well go on the shelf next to the worst regex you've ever seen. The automated doc generator needs to break these up to put one arg on each line, or just omit it altogether and let the detailed docs handle it.

It's not just the doc generator, either. I see this kind of style all the time in Python code. It's unreadable and it also makes it harder to figure out diffs when a parameter in the middle is changed (though it's helped by color coding for pull requests on GitHub and the like).

It's almost like the language attracted a bunch of people who thought indentation was the only thing you needed to make readable code. No further thought put into it.