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Against Best Practices

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vbezhenar ◴[] No.42171296[source]
How other engineering industries deal with this phenomena? Why those approach do not work with programming? I feel silly sometimes because software development is huge industry and we don't have consensus on basics.

For example I think that strict formatting is a good thing. Since I tried to use Prettier I'm using it and similar tools everywhere and I like it. I can't do vertical alignment anymore, it eats empty lines sometimes, but that's a good compromise.

May be there should be a good compromise when it comes to "best practices"? Like "DRY" is not always best, but it's always good enough, so extract common stuff every time, even if you feel it's not worth it.

I often deal with this dilemma when writing Java with default Idea inspections. They highlight duplicated code and now I need to either disable this inspection in some way or extract the chunk of code that I don't really think should be extracted, but I just can do it and move on...

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1. reverius42 ◴[] No.42171363[source]
I think we're still in the "phlogiston" era of software development.
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2. ben_w ◴[] No.42171515[source]
That good?

I think we're more like Pythagoras: some useful theory about numbers, taken way too far and became an actual religion[0] listening to the Delphic[1] Oracle[2].

[0] Tabs or spaces? Vi or emacs? Is the singularity the rapture of the nerds, with Roko's Basalisk as the devil and ${insert name here according to personal taste} as the antichrist? SOLID or move fast and break things?

vs. really a real religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism

[1] Not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)

but rather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi

[2] Not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation

but rather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle