Interesting, I've been in software development for a little more than 10 years, and just about every point I've read, I more or less agree one, will be interesting to see if it changes the next 10.
Software development topics I've changed my mind on
121–130 of 788 posts
Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on
#122> People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things. Could not agree more.
I agree but have been on teams where this slows down PR review or arguments break out. Delegating to the linter and format on save can get the team past this.
Those teams have these weirdos the article talks about.
Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on
#123> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are > (…) > People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things. What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not neces…
In my opinion, I think the author is criticizing bike shedding [1] rather than meaningful decisions. Of course some people will differ on whether a decision is one or the other. But as a whole, not sweating the details is a good quality to have whatever road in life you are on. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
Everyone dislikes bikeshedding. But people disagree on which questions are bikeshedding and which aren't.
Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on
#124> Most programming should be done long before a single line of code is written Nah. I (16+ years developer) prefer to iteratively go between coding and designing. It happens way too often that when you're coding, you stumble across something that makes you go "oh f me, that would NEVER work", which forces you to approach a problem entirely differently. Quite often you also have eureka moments with better solutions th…
ok that sounds bad, you should have the option to go back to design, but depending on what point you find that issue, depends on how much time you have wasted?
It's about defining and solving small problems all the way, and avoiding trying to solve big problems.
If you manage to restrict yourself to only solving small problems (THIS is the true challenge with software engineering, in my humble opinion), then you won't ever have wasted too much time if (when) you need to reset.
Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on
#125> Java is a great language because it's boring [...] Types are assertions we make about the world This is less of a mind-was-changed case and more just controversial, but... Checked Exceptions were a fundamentally good idea. They just needed some syntactic sugar to help redirect certain developers into less self-destructive ways of procrastinating on proper error handling. In brief for non-Java folks: Checked Excepti…
Nah, I think having a monadic Maybe/Option type and first-class support for it is the correct solution. Exceptions are fundamentally flawed.
Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: This comment was based on misreading the parent comment. I've left it up, but I should have been more careful. You've set yourself up to always be the outlier. To always need to have that discussion or tweak the rules on every project you work with. You've increased the overhead of onboarding anyone used to the default style. You've increased the overhead of you working on anyone else's projects that is more li…
I believe you may have misunderstood my comment, as I agree.
I apologise, I misread your statement as: "I would never start discussions on rust projects *without* changing that to another formatter" which changed the meaning entirely. I should have taken a moment to re-read what you wrote.
Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on
#127One more that has opened my eyes recently:
Good, empathetic UI design is invaluable.
Get a professional UI designer. Engineers are (in the main) appalling at it and will cost you time and sales.
Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on
#128No, objects aren't generally 'good', unless you think keeping multiple state machines in sync is 'good'. OO is not evil, but it also shouldn't be your default solution to everything. Also, who is this person? I immediately distrust someone who calls themselves 'a pretty cool guy'. That's for the rest of us to decide.
I had a different read of that point. More along the lines of “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” (might have butchered that saying?).
I’m also more in the FP camp - even wrote a book on the topic of FP. But I also acknowledge OO is not inherently a bad choice for a project, and many languages nowadays do exist along a spectrum of OO and FP rather than being strictly one of the other.
To me a benefit for OO might be the ubiquity - you can generally assume people will understand an OO codebase if they have done a few years of coding. With more strict FP that is just not a given - even if people took a Haskell course in Uni a decade ago :).
Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on
#129> Java is a great language because it's boring [...] Types are assertions we make about the world This is less of a mind-was-changed case and more just controversial, but... Checked Exceptions were a fundamentally good idea. They just needed some syntactic sugar to help redirect certain developers into less self-destructive ways of procrastinating on proper error handling. In brief for non-Java folks: Checked Excepti…
> They just needed some syntactic sugar to help redirect certain developers into less self-destructive ways of procrastinating on proper error handling.
Syntactic sugar it needs is an easy way (like ! prefix) to turn it to a runtime exception.
Procrastinating on exceptions is usually the correct thing to do in your typical business application - crash the current business transaction, log the error, return error response. Not much else to do.
Instead the applications are now littered with layers of try-catch-rethrow (optionally with redundant logging and wrapping into other useless exceptions) which add no benefit.
Re: Software development topics I've changed my mind on
#130Here's mine, FWIW:
1) Nix. I finally came around after one too many bricked Linux installs, and learning Docker and being kind of unhappy with it. And while I still haven't completely mastered it, you can learn enough in a reasonable amount of time to maintain a Linux install.
> Blind devotion to functional is dumb.
Except when it's not "blind" and informed by hard experience (years of OOP). Which leads me to...
2) Functional programming/immutable data. For the vast majority of use-cases, these just lead to better code, fewer bugs, and less LOC needed for a given functionality. (I just wish Elixir had the option to compile to a single binary. Roc-lang looks interesting, in that space, if you aren't into Rust.)
3) Typing. I'm coming around to it, and to a general principle of "happy-path strictness" in general. All to achieve determinism.
> Java is a great language because it's boring
No. The people who disparage software devs who have tool preferences are a special bunch and not really "software devs" (with apologies to the No True Scotsman fallacy). If everyone was supposed to be "fine" with Java, then no new languages need be developed!