Against Best Practices | slacker news

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...

> How other engineering industries deal with this phenomena? Why those approach do not work with programming?

A lot of engineering discipline is a way to prevent engineered works from causing unintentional injury, physical or fiscal.

Most software development is far away from physical injury. And fiscal injury from software failure is rarely assigned to any party.

There's no feedback loop to push us to standardized process to cover our asses; we'd all prefer to do things our own way. It's also pretty hard to do convincing studies to determine which methods are better. Few people are convinced by any of the studies; and there's not been a lot of company X dominates the industry because of practice Y kinds of things, like you see with say Toyota's quality practices in the 80s and 90s.