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.
As an embedded dev, good luck not using C
lol. Typescript isn’t actually type safe.
Yes it is? It isn’t strictly sound, but it is type-safe aside from explicit escape hatches (which other type-safe languages also provide).
Explain or be downvoted
Embedded devs have heavy gambling addiction apparently
Nonsense. If your code has reached the point of unmaintainable complexity, then blame the author, not the language.
I feel like there’s about one person that can cast this stone, and that’s because preventing this has turns Torvalds into an abusive bridge troll sometimes, but he’s actually been successful.
Well, the kernel is unmaintainably complex. Linux saves his sanity by not looking deeply into modules and only inspecting the surfaces.
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.
It’s also dynamically typed and inferior to TypeScript.
Do you mean python has something to do with functional programming, or did I misread? Because I would say e.g. Typescript is (slightly) closer to FP than Python.
Yeah, plus it has type hints and tooling to make said type hints mandatory.
Also, like, fuck golang, it’s such a shit language and the compiler does very little to protect you. I’d say that mypy does a better job of giving you AOT protection.
It took me a whole some text by compiler was supposed to be an error message, there were not any saying of any kind error or hints that it was in fact an error. It just printed some packages then exits with non-zero code.
Turns out it was import cycle.
Also, like, fuck golang, it’s such a shit language and the compiler does very little to protect you
I never understood why people like it. It’s a “new” language, and it still doesn’t seem to get the basics right. No proper null handling, and don’t get me started on
interface{}. It’s like they set out to build a better alternative to C++ while ignoring the other developments outside C/C++ for the past 15 years. The compiler is damn quick, though.I’ve dumped 18 years of C++ experience for Go in 2018, and never wanted to come back. Took me a couple of months to become accustomed.
The main Go’s feature is a green light for ignoring OOP baggage collected for decades, which makes writing code unnecessary burden. And Go have tools for not doing that.
Yes, sometimes it can be a bit ugly, but if you’re ready to trade academic impeccability for ease of use, it’s a real blast.
I’ve seen a lot of bad code in Go, which tried to do OOP things taught in school or books. Just don’t. Go requires a different approach, different mindset. Then everything falls in their places.
“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.
let you build faster like Python
I have to write so much boilerplate code to make sure my objects are of the correct type and have the required attributes! Every time I write an extension for Blender that uses context access, I have to make sure that the context is correct, that the context has the proper accessor attributes (which may not be present in some contexts), that the active datablock is not None, that the active datablock’s data type (with respect to Blender, not Python) is correct, that the active datablock’s data is not None… either all that or let the exception fall through the stack and catch it at the last moment with a bare
exceptand a generic error message.I used to think that static typing was an obstacle. Now I’m burning in the
isinstance/hasattr/getattr/setattrhell.I have to write so much boilerplate code to make sure my objects are of the correct type and have the required attributes!
That is the trap that, sadly, my company fell for too. The POC was written in python. very fast i might add. but it was only that: a POC. if the whole backend crashes due to unexpected user input - noone cared. if the frontend displayed gibberish because the JSON made wrong assumptions about not defined data types - sweep it under the rug, don’t do that during presentations.
but if it came to building a resilient system, which can be shipped to customers and preferably maintained by them (with minimal consulting contract for access to our guys)… we cursed the way python worked.
I loved python when I was a junior dev. Now I hate it (except for things like computational math). I have to add debug statements to figure out that someone snuck in the wrong type into the code.
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.
Even if the code is flawless now, all it takes is a single flawed line of new code. This is of course true for all languages, but type safety helps a lot as some types of flaws would not compile.
In my 15+ years of experience many of the actual field problems are not language / programming related at all. Unclear requirements or clear but stupid requirements cause loads of issues. These are often caused by communication problems between people and / or organizational issues.
It depends a lot on the industry of course. For embedded software, low level networking etc I mostly agree with you. However, in business applications or desktop applications it’s from my experience mostly bad requirements / communication.
Don’t forget to add incompetent leadership to that list. If feature needs to be shipped by some arbitrary deadline and the engineers are forced to rush through the design process, you end up with a patchwork hack of tech debt that leads to more tech debt.
There are definitely use cases where something like C is still the best option because it’s faster. For the most part consumer software it’s unnecessary, but it’s not obsolete for all applications.
Hell, assembly code is still necessary for the lowest-level init code. Once you have a functional stack and some var init logic you can graduate to C.
A little hair-splicy, but an assembly-free bootloader is definitely doable on some platforms – Cortex-M processors load the stack pointer from the vector table, and the initialized memory setup can be taken care of with memcpy.
True, but you’re not gonna be setting the access levels or doing anything else with control registers on a Correx-M in pure C, let alone boot to a safe state with zeroed registers.
That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows its best to write modern bootloaders in Matlab.
You joke, but my first “lets make facebook, but…” comment was from an electrical engineer buddy that wanted to use matlab. That was the whole pitch. “Facebook, but matlab.”
It did not go far.
Real men use Scratch for everything.
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.
Yeah, particularly the broadcasting really irks me.
That is an opinion you can hold for yourself and then make compromises as you encounter reality. I do expect programmers to hold strong opinions.But when you broadcast it, you strip yourself of the option to make compromises. You’re just saying something which is going to be wrong in one way or another in most situations. I do expect programmers to be smarter than that.
I agree with the post. Setting up typescript takes an hour or two if you have no clue what you’re doing. In return you get the absence of (the equivalent of) null pointer exceptions.
I chuckle every time I find an NPE in the Java backend. Doesn’t happen to me. Can’t happen to me.
Sidenote, while I’m already gloating: Once the backend code had an error where they were comparing two different kinds of IDs (think, user ID and SSN), which gave wrong results. This error can’t happen to me either, because I type my IDs such that they are not comparable. A strong type system really is a godsend.
NPEs are the reason why my team moved to Kotlin. Well, that and all the other myriad advantages Kotlin brings to the table.
One of the backend devs started using Kotlin. From time to time I need to read backend code, and I have to say it’s very easy to write an incomprehensible mess in Kotlin.
Kotlin isn’t perfect and it gives the devs quite a lot of freedom. I would argue that if your Kotlin code is messy, that’s on you - but it will still be significantly less prone to failures like NPEs. Unless you opt out of null safety by using the dreaded ?-Operator.
I really like how I can turn everything into immutable
val’s and represent different paths as expressions, it can IMO really reduce the complexity of a function and makes it easier to spot bugs. I’ve been migrating some code of a FOSS app to Kotlin and was able to shrink most classes by like 30% while making it easier to read. The only thing I dislike about it is the additional syntax for various things, I could do without having multiple ways to write a constructor.Yes, there are things about Kotlin I don’t love either. But I still like how it was clearly developed having developer quality-of-life in mind.
Setting up typescript takes an hour or two if you have no clue what you’re doing
Modern versions of Node.js have native TypeScript support. For scripts, you can just write the script then run it. That’s it. No build process needed. A beginner could just rely on type checking in their editor (I think VS Code has the TypeScript tooling installed by default?)
For web apps, just use something like Bun or Deno. Bun gives you practically all the tooling you’d need (JS runtime, TypeScript, package manager, test runner, bundler, and framework for building web apps) out-of-the-box. It doesn’t have a formatter, but you can just use your editor’s formatter.
Recently I’ve just been getting co-pilot to do it
I have an alias that calls the copilot CLI with a prompt that says “set up typescript”
Fuck this
That’s like one of the few good uses for LLMs in development - setting up new projects, but AI haters will downvote you no matter what.
Dunno, I picked python as my language for personal projects because it has type hinting now and jobs I was looking at wanted it. I’d like to use C# but I need to find a good IDE on Linux.
I’ve gotten pretty good at C because it’s what my company uses but god damn I am tired of fixing memory errors from bad programming. Nobody uses best practices and it’s horrid. Best practices came about to avoid issues. Use them. Please. I don’t want to be the guy to answer “please fix my memory issues” tasks. If you don’t know what you’re doing, please choose a different god damn language.
I’ve only gotten this way because I’ve tried to read the fucking manual. Stop telling me I’m wrong when you don’t know how it works. Stop telling me I’m wrong when you don’t check for errors. I’m telling you this not because I want to talk. I’m telling you because I learned the hard way fixing your code and I don’t want to do it anymore.
I just use VS code with c# extensions on Linux. It works fine. I also use vim with lsp support for C# sometimes.
If you want more, you may also want to check out Rider from Jetbrains.
Rider here for serious work. It’s also free for non commercial use if that works for you.
I can’t use codium because on sway the file open dialog doesn’t work and I haven’t figured out why
Just in case you have this problem with other software: it’s probably an XDG desktop portal issue, I haven’t used Sway specifically for a while but it took me a lot of trial and error to wrangle my portals into submission without using Plasma.
Unfortunately I can’t help you there. I just use plain old kde plasma on Fedora. If your favorite code editor supports Language Server Protocol (LSP), you can probably get it to do code completion for C# one way or another. Vim, neovim, Kate, and many others do.
I believe zed has extensions for c#, and I guess more importantly, dotnet.
At this point, unless you have the money to grab sublime (or specifically want foss or even just free as in beer), and you aren’t sold on the way of life of the old guard like the modern vims or emacs, zed is pretty much the best there is.
I used to be such a jetbrains guy, but that was back when they did actually have something nobody else really offered outside of Microsoft. Before that, for a good long time, I was an emacs guy, until I had to use a windows computer for work and emacs just doesn’t fit well there, couldn’t get a good equivalent of the daemon going consistently, had to switch. And to be frank, lisp is the fucking worst.
Nowadays, there are so many options though, even, or especially, on foss side. Or even just free. Hard to justify the jetbrains kinds of specialized tools, now that the same sugary, smooth experience is almost exactly achievable on those. And faster.
I have been happy with zed for quite a while now. Apart from the (disableable, thank god) first class AI stuff, I haven’t a single complaint. It feels as fast and responsive as sublime, and while the ecosystem isn’t there yet, I can get all my stacks and tooling to run currently like it was a jetbrains ide from back in the day. Rust, dotnet, deno/ts, it all just works after setup.
I would still go for sublime just for the ecosystem, but I haven’t the economics at a point where I can choose convenience for a price, if a close equivalent exists with the price of nothing but contributions occasionally. The source being open, even if my PRs don’t get merged, I can just live with my fork and have it natively the way I want, without working around the extension limitations.
Well, the author is to blame for the choice of language.
That is, unless somebody forced their hand. What happens a lot in professional settings. Then it’s that other person to blame.
Edit: removed because I got it wrong
Typescript literally doesn’t work though, every large system has some JavaScript interface somewhere and the “any” type propagates through the system because there’s no type safety at runtime
Fuck them both to death
I don’t understand how this would happen. If the any type truly “propagates through the system”, that means you’re passing around a variable of which you say, “I don’t know what this is. You deal with it.” How can you do any meaningful operations on it when you don’t know the type?
There are plenty of libraries to provide type safety at runtime.
Skill issue. You just didn’t set up your tsconfig properly to begin with, which allowed someone to sneak in unsafe code.
your
I wouldn’t make a typescript repo. But every single one I’ve had to work on has had the same problem
Don’t use any, and figure out any interfaces or types you don’t have. Have a modocum of discipline to add the compile time safety
JavaScript introduces it, if it uses typescript code you lose all type safety
I add a lint rule to prevent using the
anytype. Solves the problemSo, not a language win after all?
I’ve written thousands of lines of untyped python code for a system (still) used daily by hundreds of users, handling time critical as well as financial data. It made the company I worked for millions and it worked. Was it bug free? Nope, bugs would appear in production from time to time, but they were very easy to detect, and very quickly solved, especially because of the fact that python is an interpreted language. In 7 years of working on that application there was only one bug that caused data corruption and required us to reprocess some data that took a day or three. That was the worst thing to happen in the entire lifetime of that codebase. I totally agree that if you structure your code properly, log properly and give your developers the trust and permissions to actually solve stuff in production quickly, you might even get a competitive advantage.
