Best Practices Exist For A Reason
tomdale.net
Best Practices Exist For A Reason
1–10 of 105 posts
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#2The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern.
Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? (https://gist.github.com/357981)
In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either approach, isn't it a purely personal and political choice?
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#3First, Isaac Schlueter isn't advocating against best practices with ASI. He's advocating for an alternate best practice that you disagree with. In that very article he suggests an alternate place to put the necessary semicolons.
Second, the CouchDB thing isn't because of a lack of best practices, it's because the wrong best practices were misapplied. And in the end, its use of best practices prevented it from severely hurting CouchDB's reputation.
The best practice is that password data should be stored as a salted hash, so if the database is compromised, the original password can't be retrieved. It's rare that the salted hash is intended to be public information, and that's what the CouchDB people did. What they should have done is realized that since they're deliberately sharing the hashed passwords, the original best practice doesn't apply, and they need to break it down and reexamine it (probably a good idea anyway for a project of its size). And they should have reached the conclusion that SHA1 is much too weak and/or that the salted passwords shouldn't be shared. In the new version, CouchDB 1.2, where an effort to correct the problem was made, the passwords aren't public. But at least, aside from the encryption strength, they got the hashing right, in that they used salts so rainbow tables can't be used. SHA-1 is easy to brute force for simple passwords, but as passwords get longer and contain more than dictionary words, it gets harder to brute force. It's easy to communicate that they screwed up, and easy to communicate that it's no worse than Sony password databases that were compromised, but the truth lies somewhere between the two, and can be seen by carefully considering the details of the case.
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#4The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern. Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? ( https://gist.github.com/357981 ) In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either ap…
You can't solve everything with numbers, and I say this as someone who believes very strongly in data-driven decision-making. Even given perfect data as far as what practices are more effective, you still have the problem of interpreting it. This adds its own layer of purely personal and political choices.
My advice? Don't work with people whose best practices are your anti-patterns. Or at least strive to work with people who agree with you on a core set of principles. Or hell, work with people who agree with you on nothing. Just don't complain when you can't work with any of them. :-)
And besides that, what's wrong with "purely personal and political choice[s]"? Being that I'm the person who's writing my code, I'm allowed to make a certain number of purely personal choices. That is, as long as I take into account the political consequences of doing so. Put another way, it's ok to have personal preferences, but you have to take other peoples' feelings into account too.
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#5The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern. Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? ( https://gist.github.com/357981 ) In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either ap…
The problem here is viewing software development as some sort of monolithic phenomenon. "Software development" is a crude moniker that covers an incredibly wide variety of efforts, varying in scale, detail, and significance across a much wider range than anything else we consider to be a single discipline. "Best practices" for development of an iphone game may not be the same as for flight software for an orbital rocket or for an international banking backbone.
Edit: to use an analogy, imagine if all vehicle development was treated with the same terminology. Whether you're building helicopters, spacecraft, mass produced commuter cars, RC toys, nuclear powered submarines, formula 1 race cars, or tunnel boring machines: all of it is just vehicle manufacturing right? Just as anyone would find it ridiculous to put forward advice that could possibly apply across all of those distinctly different disciplines we should view advice about software with the same skepticism.
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#6With respect to style and syntax at least, this is why I like golang. There is one true way to format a go program, and there is a compiler/autoformatter to enforce it.
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#7The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern. Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? ( https://gist.github.com/357981 ) In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either ap…
That example gist went a long way towards convincing me of isaacs' comma prefix style.
To me, consistency is important. All of my codebase is traditional comma postfix, so I'll keep using that; however, maybe with some new projects I'll try on the comma prefix pants and see if it helps.
Thanks for the link!
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#8The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern. Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? ( https://gist.github.com/357981 ) In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either ap…
That example gist went a long way towards convincing me of isaacs' comma prefix style. To me, consistency is important. All of my codebase is traditional comma postfix, so I'll keep using that; however, maybe with some new projects I'll try on the comma prefix pants and see if it helps. Thanks for the link!
To play at devil's advocate, please don't. Otherwise you should have written your comment like this:
To me
, consistency is important
. All of my codebase is traditional comma postfix
, so I'll keep using that
; however
, maybe with some new projects I'll try on the comma prefix [...]
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#9The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern. Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? ( https://gist.github.com/357981 ) In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either ap…
I think using comma-first syntax as a counter example is disingenuous. Whether you're a novice programmer or an expert programmer, using comma-first or comma-last isn't going to bite you in a way that isn't immediately solvable.
Omitting semi-colons, however, can cause novice JavaScript programmers serious grief. Nevermind novice JavaScript programmers – they cause me grief, and I put semi-colons everywhere! That's because I'm often called in to debug our customers websites, and on several such occasions I've had to fix bugs that never would have occurred if that customer used semi-colons properly.
Sure, if our customers understood JavaScript's ASI and how to use semi-colons "properly", I wouldn't have this problem either. Except, as Tom points out, the reality is that almost none of these people will invest in doing so.
Re: Best Practices Exist For A Reason
#10The main problem with appealing to "best practices" is this: One man's best practice is another man's anti-pattern. Between semicolon-free folks and JavaScript traditionalists, who gets to play the role of the expert? If Node.js is popular, does that mean that Isaac's comma-first style is "correct"? ( https://gist.github.com/357981 ) In the absence of a quantitative engineering method with which to evaluate either ap…
The problem here is viewing software development as some sort of monolithic phenomenon. "Software development" is a crude moniker that covers an incredibly wide variety of efforts, varying in scale, detail, and significance across a much wider range than anything else we consider to be a single discipline. "Best practices" for development of an iphone game may not be the same as for flight software for an orbital roc…
The problem is that the industry, as a whole, is still extremely young, and simply hasn't had the time to develop a standard set of good, let alone best, practices. Tools and processes are changing at a rapid rate, and it will simply take time for best practices to sort themselves out.
>"Best practices" for development of an iphone game may not be the same as for flight software for an orbital rocket or for an international banking backbone.
I disagree. There are a few things that should be common across all of these, like not storing passwords in plain text.