What's your most controversial programming opinion?

#1

Post by fosk » Sat, Dec 18, 2010, 3:55 PM UTC

What's your most controversial programming opinion?
stackoverflow.com

Re: What's your most controversial programming opinion?

#2

Post by yesno » Sat, Dec 18, 2010, 6:14 PM UTC

Avoiding geeks who have too many opinions

Re: What's your most controversial programming opinion?

#3

Post by tbrownaw » Sat, Dec 18, 2010, 6:19 PM UTC

I rather like these two:

http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html

    I find OOP technically unsound. ...
    I find OOP philosophically unsound. ...
    I find OOP methodologically wrong. ...

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-DCI-Architecture (at around 39:30)

    You cannot do object-oriented programming in Java.

What the first calls OOP, the second calls "class-oriented programming". What the second calls proper OOP, I think is more along the lines of what the first advocates.

Re: What's your most controversial programming opinion?

#4

Post by mendable » Sat, Dec 18, 2010, 6:24 PM UTC

I am often intrigued by people debating what language should be the first language other dev's learn.

It seems as if people argue for the language they picked up first / have most experience in.

I believe the correct answer is not a direct answer, but something along the lines of "it doesn't matter, so long as you learn several, well".

Re: What's your most controversial programming opinion?

#5

Post by anonymous246 » Sat, Dec 18, 2010, 6:42 PM UTC

I like C++, STL, and parts of Boost. Surprisingly, this is controversial these days. :)

Re: What's your most controversial programming opinion?

#6

Post by frou_dh » Sat, Dec 18, 2010, 6:46 PM UTC

A: I have no interest in JavaScript and am fed up hearing about it.

I assume that's increasingly controversial :)

Re: What's your most controversial programming opinion?

#7

Post by PostOnce » Sat, Dec 18, 2010, 6:46 PM UTC

mendable wrote: post #4

I am often intrigued by people debating what language should be the first language other dev's learn. It seems as if people argue for the language they picked up first / have most experience in. I believe the correct answer is not a direct answer, but something along the lines of "it doesn't matter, so long as you learn several, well".

I often recommend Python because it enables you to do a lot, quickly, and is easy to read.

I learned C first, stopped studying C when I tried to make a GUI for win32. ~2 pages of code for an empty window. ~5 lines in Python.

So, the ideal first language is whatever is easy to understand and fast to accomplish something. Instant gratification, in other words.

Re: What's your most controversial programming opinion?

#8

Post by jberryman » Sat, Dec 18, 2010, 6:49 PM UTC

So can we assume that the most highly-voted are actual the least controversial? This is kind of interesting.

Re: What's your most controversial programming opinion?

#9

Post by there » Sat, Dec 18, 2010, 6:56 PM UTC

in my opinion, writing unit tests is overrated.

i think some developers put too much stock in unit testing and it gives them (and their managers, customers, and co-workers) a false sense of security. they end up wasting time and not really preventing as many bugs as they think it will. application logic changes and they have to write twice as much code to change the application and all of the tests that depended on that logic.

writing a regression test for a complicated routine or library is one thing, but writing a test for every method of a class just for the warm fuzzy of their test framework telling them they have 100% coverage is silly.

Re: What's your most controversial programming opinion?

#10

Post by gfodor » Sat, Dec 18, 2010, 6:58 PM UTC

The top items don't seem to be very controversial, but instead seem to be "things that good programmers think are true, and bad ones don't."

Here's mine: if you haven't gone through a respectable 4 year CS program, odds are I'm not going to want to hire you since your brain isn't wired to think about algorithms and data structures instead of code and servers.