Software development topics I've changed my mind on

> 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”.

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.

> the formatting and conventions of the blueprint

Some of those formatting conventions are written in blood. The clarity of a blueprint is a big deal when people are using it to convey safety critical information.

I don’t think code formatting rises anywhere close to that level, but it’s also trying to reduce cognitive load which is a big deal in software development. Nobody wants to look at multiple lines concatenated together, how far beyond that you take things runs into diminishing returns. However at a minimum formatting changes shouldn’t regularly complicate doing a diff.

I 100% agree. The problem is that after a half a century, software engineering discipline has been unable to agree on global conventions and standards. I recently had an experience where a repair crew was worried about the odd looking placement of a concrete beam in my house. I brought over the blueprints, and the technician found the schedule of beams and columns within seconds, pinpointed the beam and said, "Ah, that's why. We just need to <solution I won't go into>". Just then it struck me how we can't do this in software engineering, even when the project is basically a bog-standard business app: CRUD API backed by an RDBMS.

> The problem is that after a half a century, software engineering discipline has been unable to agree on global conventions and standards.

It can't, and it won't, as long as we insist on always working directly on the "single source of truth", and representing it as plaintext code. It's just not sufficient to comprehensibly represent all concerns its consumers have at the same time. We're stuck in endless fights about what is cleaner or more readable or more maintainable way of abstracting / passing errors / sizing functions / naming variables... and so on, because the industry still misses the actual answer: it depends on what you're doing at the moment. There is no one best representation, one best function size. In fact, one form may be ideal for you now, and the opposite of it may be ideal for you five minutes later, as you switch from e.g. understanding the module to debugging a specific issue in it.

We've saturated the expressive capability of our programming paradigm. We're sliding back and forth along the Pareto frontier, like a drunkard leaning against a wall, trying to find their way back to a pub without falling over. No, inventing even more mathematically complex category of magic monads won't help, that's just repackaging complexity to reach a different point on the Pareto frontier.

Hint: in construction, there is never one blueprint everyone works with. Try to fit all information about geometry, structural properties, material properties, interior arrangement, plumbing, electricity, insulation, HVAC, geological conditions, hydrological conditions, and tax conditions onto a single flat image, and... you'll get a good approximation of what source code looks like in programming as it is today.

I think we have to think of software like books and writing. It is about conveying information, and while there are grammatical rules to language and conventions around good and bad writing, we're generally happy to leave it there because too many rules is so constructive as to remove the ability to express information in the way we feel we need to. We just have to accept that some are better writers than others, or we like the style of some authors better.