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Software development topics I've changed my mind on

(chriskiehl.com)
873 points belter | 1 comments | 05 Feb 25 09:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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latexr ◴[05 Feb 25 11:39 UTC] No.42947128[source]▶
> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are

> (…)

> People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things.

What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not necessarily the ground truth.

What you’re essentially saying is “cherish the people who care up to the level I personally and subjectively think is right, and dismiss everyone who cares more as insane weirdos who cannot prioritise”.

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oytis ◴[05 Feb 25 12:59 UTC] No.42947871[source]▶
To me "craft" is about keeping code efficient, scalable, extensible, well-tested and documented. Code style is more about what naming convention to use, tabs vs spaces etc. - it's nice to have it consistent, but no need to spend more than 5 minutes arguing about it.
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1. ctxc ◴[05 Feb 25 13:34 UTC] No.42948236[source]▶
Tabs/spaces is a non-issue, agreed - IDEs handle it.

But surely naming convention contributes to keeping code documented, extensible and efficient?

A deviation from the norm leads to people thinking x does not exist in a large code base, leading to them implementing duplicate methods/functionality, leading to one instance evolving differently enough to cause subtle bugs but not enough to be distinct, or leading to one instance getting fixes the other does not etc?

Sample size of 1, but I've seen it happen unfortunately.