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Comment by iheartpotatoes | Hacker News Reader

"Best practices" is a bit of a red herring. Every company differs considerably, and online blogospher experts throw the term around as sort of a gatekeep-y way to keep the order ("What do you mean you don't know (arbitrary) best practices??!?!") The only way to learn best practices is to work at multiple companies / projects.

For example, I worked at Intel, Lucent, Apple and DEC. Each one had significantly different "best practices". When I look at how we did code there vs something like, oh, the GNU project, they were WORLDS apart. So even if you made the claim, you'd still fall short from the new environment.

If you're lucky, eventually YOU'LL be the one defining best practices.

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I'll second that a lot of 'best practices' is cargo cult like gate keeping.

Just learn how to write idiomatic code in whatever language / framework you are using. At least the approaches are good enough. And other OCD/Autistic programmers won't lose their shit when they see it.

Do try to write code in an active AKA explicit way. Whne you read the code it should be obvious what it's trying to do. Code where the right thing 'just happens' is never clever it's just bad.

Do remember the process you use for a tiny team is different than google or facebook or a web dev sweatshop.

'idiomatic' vs 'best practices'?

My inner Northcote Parkinson sort of triggers on 'best practices'. Best tends to imply that all the other ways to skin the cat are 'bad.' Which is likely objectively untrue.

Idiomatic is more neutral and means basically just do it the way everyone else tends to. The real advantage to that is you generally avoid pitfalls and annoying other coders.

They can mean very similar things so that the question could be:

How to learn idioms when you have no one to teach you?

To which I think we land on the recommendation: seek good examples and mimic them. Trouble is finding them.

It is. I work in c# and if we take idiomatic to be how most devs write c#, then idiomatic c# is garbage.

But the question still remains... how do you determine what "good examples" are?

Thanks for that! "Idiomatic" is such a better word for describing what you actually want. "Best practices" implies that we know for sure that the practice will result in a better outcome. This is almost never true because programming is a very situational activity requiring a lot of judgement calls. If you turn off your brain and apply "best practices", the result is almost always horrific.

However, "idomatic" means writing in a way that other people are likely to be able to understand. That's a great goal! Often it's worth it to write code that isn't quite as good for the situation if it is more idiomatic. It's a judgement call still, but it's still important to know what is and isn't idiomatic so that you can make that judgement call.

Please don't use autistic or OCD as slurs.

Is it being used a slur? It's a fundamental characteristic of those types of people.

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