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Comment by benihana | Hacker News Reader

>The correct answer is to never

Ah sweet, it's that one commenter who can prescribe the absolute correct answer to very complex situations with a couple of simple platitudes! Since you seem to be in a mood to drop the correct answer, maybe you can help me with some difficult decisions I'm facing:

what programming language should I use?

what should the next move of my business be?

is she really the one, or should I move on?

Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.

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Not the comment parent, but I can also prescribe absolutely correct answers to complex situations via simple platitudes. There's a Udacity course on it, I highly advise taking it, but since it takes so little time I'll just answer these questions for you.

>what programming language should I use?

Haskell.

>what should the next move of my business be?

If you're not in a Series C, growth hack; if you've done your Series C, look into the Caymans.

>is she really the one, or should I move on?

Have a divorce attorney on retainer, be ready to delete your Facebook account at a moment's notice, and ideally start going to the gym now, but with those preparations in mind pursue her as if she's the one.

>Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.

This isn't a question and I don't understand how to respond to it.

I know you're joking but this is on balance pretty solid advice.

I never joke.

I won't speak to the sarcasm-as-argument response, but I will say that there is a sentiment behind it that I do agree with.

I say - with differing commentary after the first 4-5 sentences - in every class I teach:

"I don't like the phrase 'best practice'. I won't use it. It's presumptuous and condescending. What's best for me might suck for you. Who am I to know your business requirements? There is only one true 'best practice', in my view, and that is simply to have practices that you and your team follow that serve to further your business goals and meet your business requirements. SharePoint isn't a best practice, but a system to support a corporate culture of collaboration or information sharing is a practice that many businesses can agree with. jQuery isn't a best practice, but using a framework that improves your team's productivity and helps it to meet your business' requirements - that's a good practice to follow."

We need a new phrase that gets the point across without the cognitive burden of being condescending and presumptuous. Consensus practice? Common practice? Popular practice? I don't know. But I know that "best" is a superlative that is too often used to disguise a marketing goal or to dazzle the listener/reader into accepting the superiority of the person using it.

Depending on how it's used, I find "idiomatic" to be useful. Built into the meaning is that it may not translate to other areas, and most people understand that while it is a useful shorthand to making something succinct and expressive, you fall back to other things when it doesn't match well.

Traditionally (at least I've first heard these phrases in a business context) "best practice" describes what very successful businesses do and "common practice" describes what the average business does.

I ignore this distinction and have just replaced "best practice" with "common practice" since I pretty much always want to say something along the lines of "this is how a lot of people do it, there's good reasons for it (list of reasons) but everything depends on context so critically reflect if it makes sense to follow these practices or not on an individual basis"

That's true, but I think in general if we had someone else making our decisions for us (obviously this is completely undesirable) they'd mostly be correct. Emotion plays a huge role in what we do, many times a negative role.

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