I would say, and do say, that Principles are Rules of Thumb
If you've ever had to live through some shit, principles are born as a way to stay alive when shit hits the fan. They aren't simple rules of thumb for the people who live them.
Principles are products of practice, not the reverse
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Principles are products of practice, not the reverse
#12It is a moral principle that websites should mostly use HTML. This is not because it's the easiest way to build websites and certainly not because it's the best way to make lots of money. It's because it ensures everyone can use the same web and gives the user agent as much power as possible to act on the user's behalf.
Re: Principles are products of practice, not the reverse
#13Well, if the phrase on the title is true for you, you are working with some really unprincipled principles. They shouldn't. Principles are something that guides practice. Like the principles of aerodynamics guided the evolution of the airplane even if they weren't fully known at the time. (And this example on the article is just wrong.) If you use the same word for something that is derived from practice (like best p…
I'm not sure why you picked physics as an example which probably is the single field where the most principles were developed from mimicking practice and observation, aerodynamics included.
Re: Principles are products of practice, not the reverse
#14Well, if the phrase on the title is true for you, you are working with some really unprincipled principles. They shouldn't. Principles are something that guides practice. Like the principles of aerodynamics guided the evolution of the airplane even if they weren't fully known at the time. (And this example on the article is just wrong.) If you use the same word for something that is derived from practice (like best p…
I think it's more of a loop. Principles guide practice, but practice may cause you to discover that your principles were mistaken of limited. Eg, the discovery of quantum effects.
A more worked-through explanation of this can be found by reading up on "reflective equilibrium" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_equilibrium
Re: Principles are products of practice, not the reverse
#15It is a moral principle that websites should mostly use HTML. This is not because it's the easiest way to build websites and certainly not because it's the best way to make lots of money. It's because it ensures everyone can use the same web and gives the user agent as much power as possible to act on the user's behalf.
Not according to my morals!
Re: Principles are products of practice, not the reverse
#16The blog post would benefit greatly if it had some examples from the world of web dev. It's not very clear what kind of principles they are talking about.
Re: Principles are products of practice, not the reverse
#17I started off, from Day One, heavily structuring and documenting my code. These days, I don't even think about it, and my productivity is pretty much as good as you can get. Plus, I am the one that usually has to go back into my code, and maintain it, so I'm glad of that habit. "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Mis-attributed to Aristotle.
> These days, I don't even think about it
When I read this, I assumed you meant "I don't even think about heavily structuring and documenting my code". And my intuition (after 14 yoe or so) is that this is correct. Heavy structure for a greenfield area is a premature optimization. And comments are only for expressing what can't be expressed using code or other tools. I'd say if you need _heavy_ comments you've chosen the wrong tool for the job.
Then again, maybe I'm just not smart enough to anticipate the right levels of abstraction on the first go.
Re: Principles are products of practice, not the reverse
#18It is a moral principle that websites should mostly use HTML. This is not because it's the easiest way to build websites and certainly not because it's the best way to make lots of money. It's because it ensures everyone can use the same web and gives the user agent as much power as possible to act on the user's behalf.
"It's because it ensures everyone can use the same web"
But they cannot. A blind person just cannot make good use of a visual map feature, so there is no reason to make it in pure html for accesibility. You'll have to find other ways to serve them. (I assume mostly with text descriptions of the area)
Re: Principles are products of practice, not the reverse
#19The core thesis is "I believe principles should not stifle progress". It turns out that people can have very different kind of principles in mind. Some principles are primarily ethical, such as "Make our product work for people with disabilities, because it's the right thing to do". Some principles are primarily legal, such as "Encrypt data at rest and in motion, because we don't want compliance problems". Some princ…
There are the deeper principles that are broadly applicable in many fields, generate new practices, and applicable in creative and versatile ways.
Re: Principles are products of practice, not the reverse
#20The blog post would benefit greatly if it had some examples from the world of web dev. It's not very clear what kind of principles they are talking about.
The example given in the post was using s rather than semantic HTML elements. The motivation for the principle of using "semantic HTML elements" comes from the lofty ideals of the Semantic Web[0]. However, these principles didn't come from best practice. Instead, someone (Tim Berners-Lee) thought that it was a cool idea and tried to convince everyone of it without demonstrating that it could actually deliver on any of the promises it made. The argument instead is that principles should be based on what is proven to work, rather than what sounds good in theory. I agree with the sentiment in the post.