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Writing Rules to Disregard

theparisreview.org

1–10 of 16 posts

Re: Writing Rules to Disregard

#4
My favourite wikipedia rule: Ignore all rules.

"If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules

Some explanation of what it's meant to mean, with a selection of quotes about breaking rules:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_r...

I really like that page - so well-written. "Use common sense. ...There is no common sense." In fact, the wikipedia pages about rules are much better written and more enjoyable to read than the average article is - which seems odd, but I guess is how it should be. There are a lot of very funny pages about the rules.[0] Many essays, on every aspect of wikipedia, here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Essay_directory

(A lot of the titles and short explanations on that page are fascinating/funny, a great intro to wikipedia culture...as it should be.)

[0] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Essay_directory#Humo...

Re: Writing Rules to Disregard

#6

Wonder what the equivalent "Coding Rules to Disregard" might be.

I really hate the "don't comment, good code is self explicit rule" personnaly. It's self explicit for the person who wrote it 10 years ago and had the spec and the client at hand, surely.

Re: Writing Rules to Disregard

#7

Wonder what the equivalent "Coding Rules to Disregard" might be.

If you know of any coding rule that is universally true, I'd like to hear.

Maybe... Don't use goto to jump to the middle of a different block of code? I don't know any exception to this one, but it's also prohibited on all modern languages, so I don't think it's a "coding rule" anymore.

Re: Writing Rules to Disregard

#8
post #6

Wonder what the equivalent "Coding Rules to Disregard" might be.

I really hate the "don't comment, good code is self explicit rule" personnaly. It's self explicit for the person who wrote it 10 years ago and had the spec and the client at hand, surely.

If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand. /s

Re: Writing Rules to Disregard

#9
This is an example of how the HN rule about stripping out the "Three" in the title has resulted in ambiguity: I thought the term "writing rules" was present-participle verb + object, but it turned out to be gerund-as-adjective + noun. (I might have the grammatical labels wrong.)

Re: Writing Rules to Disregard

#10

Wonder what the equivalent "Coding Rules to Disregard" might be.

The coding equivalent would be overzealous linter rules. For example, sometimes linters demand that all variable and function names follow a project-specific capitalization convention, but I find that type of consistency is often counterproductive.
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