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Against Best Practices

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279 points ingve | 1 comments | 18 Nov 24 07:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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vbezhenar ◴[18 Nov 24 10:49 UTC] 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. federiconafria ◴[18 Nov 24 11:38 UTC] No.42171554[source]▶
I think one thing the industry does not do properly is applying different practices and standards depending on context.

An retailer website is not the same as a trading platform, the same way that a house is not the same as a railway station. But we blindly try to apply the same "good practices" everywhere.

We also have another interesting phenomenon, our products can mutate in their lifetime, and our practices should follow (they often don't) an MVP can become a critical system, a small internal project can become a client-facing application, we can re-platform, re-write, etc. That's very rare in other industries.