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Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
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Re: Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
#12It’s best practice to apply best practices when it makes sense.
The catch? Knowing when it makes sense requires experience ;)
Re: Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
#13I get your friend, and there's another point he can make: Imagine a world with self taught Civil Engineers.
Pretty much. IT as a field is a toddler. But it makes so many people happy we don't care it's still at the anal stage. Maybe in a century techs and standards will stabilize.
>Pretty much. IT as a field is a toddler.
It's exactly as old as nuclear engineering.
If it's a toddler, it's because of the mentality of the people involved, not because there was no time to figure things out.
Re: Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
#14To some extend best practices are just developer preferences, but some best practices are also due to experience which has shown alternatives to attract problems down the lane.
Personally I think the most important thing is to agree within a project, what style and what practices to follow, so everyone is going in the same direction. This should in my opinion make the code more maintainable and extensible, due to the reduction in cognitive overload for the developers involved.
Re: Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
#15I get your friend, and there's another point he can make: Imagine a world with self taught Civil Engineers.
Oh yeah the last bridge collapsed, but that is a known issue. It is fixed in this bridge, trust me.
Blame the contractor is what you normally do in this case :-)
I once built a system reverse engineering a program used for soil analysis to see why one of our bridges fell off its suports.
Re: Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
#16Are civil engineering "best practices" just legal preferences?
Re: Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
#17A LOT of coding style, abstraction style, function vs inline is just preferences. This is what makes code reviews hard. Both the author and reviewer can easily fall into the trap of trying to "correct" the other person - without realizing that they are merely forcing preferences on the other.
That said, it is ok to write down some preferences as a team/org standard that everyone can follow.
Just don't make the job a lawyers attempt at software engineering.
Re: Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
#18I hope at least that we're in a phase of the profession where we're "discovering" the actual best practices.
There have been a lot of best practices that have been hypothesized over time: OOP, functional programming, unit testing, generative testing, formal analysis, strict typing, weak typing, etc.
And all these as-of-yet unfounded hypotheses are important! You've got to have a theory of how something works before you can prove that it does. Hopefully we can start to devise those proofs.
Re: Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
#19Are civil engineering "best practices" just legal preferences?
They are built on top of a ocean of blood
Re: Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?
#20Steven Sinofsky gave a talk and said something to the effect of, we've been building roads, bridges and edifices for thousands of years. So, best practices and solved problems abound---and even then we still get it wrong sometimes. Whereas, software engineering is maybe 70 years old (generously)? So, there is much to learn and a lot of "baseline" knowledge that has yet to be established. I think it's a good way to th…
Undergrad CS profs are teaching everyone that theres "Nothing new under the sun."