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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: 0s | 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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hliyan ◴[05 Feb 25 12:26 UTC] No.42947527[source]▶
There's another way to look at this: if you consider the school of thought that says that the code is the design, and compilation is the construction process, then stressing over code style is equivalent to stressing over the formatting and conventions of the blueprint (to use a civil engineering metaphor), instead of stressing over load bearing, material costs and utility of the space.

I'm fond of saying that anything that doesn't survive the compilation process is not design but code organization. Design would be: which data structures to use (list, map, array etc.), which data to keep in memory, which data to load/save and when, which algorithms to use, how to handle concurrency etc. Keeping the code organized is useful and is a part of basic hygiene, but it's far from the defining characteristic of the craft.

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1. s1mplicissimus ◴[05 Feb 25 18:17 UTC] No.42952786[source]▶
The construction metaphor isn't a very good fit here in my opinion. No building is expected to have the amount of adaptability that is expected of software. It falls completely apart for interpreted languages. When is a PHP app constructed in this metaphor? On every single request? The metaphor assumes a "design once, build once" approach, which is basically no software I've ever seen used in real life. Hardware, OS, language, collaborator/dependency updates all require changes to the application code more often than not. And that's assuming the feature set stays stable, which, in my experience is also quiet rare. Maintainability is therefore a quality dimension of software, and reduced cognitive load usually results in increased maintainability (curious if someone has a counterexample to that)

That is not to say I'm one of those people who need a specific code style to have their weird brain satisfied. But not using a linter/autoformatter at all [when available] in 2025 sounds like the opposite of "work smart, not hard"