5 Very Unlikely But Fun Things I’d Like To See in 2022
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A progressive wish list of humorous, and extremely unlikely, events.
1 — Python Drops Fixed Format
I’m no fan of Python, as you may have guessed if you’ve read a cross-section my previous articles where I do try to take a swipe at it regularly, but in my own personal opinion it is a necessary evil if only for ambitious data scientists to eventually (through hard work and actually understanding data structures and their uses) be recognised as somewhat genuine programmers.
Admittedly it’s all a bit like fixed format Visual Basic with multitudes of libraries pretty much doing all of the hard work for you anyway — the only challenging aspect being able to understand its hideously verbose exception reporting. Say no more. Please, say no more.
One thing that I would like to see, however, is for Python to drop its ridiculous fixed formatting.
Controversial aside: Python just isn’t the masterstroke that is Fortran — it’s nowhere near as powerful, useful, or fast as that mighty stalwart of real computer science and proper software engineering.
Having both a fixed format and still being interpreted in 2022 makes it look, well, amateur. I’ve yet to see a lengthy Python program to be honest, but see hundreds of little wrapper utilities happily generating their gigabytes of logs on a daily basis.
Python, has a formatting problem, and is ill suited to be permanently resident in any progressive engineer’s box of tricks.
2 — JavaScript is Banned from the Internet
Yes indeed, the revolution that can’t come soon enough for a language that has become both a danger to society at large and to aspiring software engineers in particular.
For society, it has created the most verbose, obfuscated, and in security terms most dangerous infrastructure that we’ve unfortunately come to rely on. Imagine writing your website’s functionality in Swiss cheese, riddling it with bullets, and throwing it on a metal fire. That’s JavaScript.
For individuals, it’s akin to giving them the keys to an armoury having been previously trained in the use of a popgun during a rather…
