Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattbaker | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I disagreed with a decent amount, but I tried to read it as “here are the patterns and practices I feel passionate about” and that made it an interesting read for me.

The sort of declarative good/bad language worries me a bit because people new to the language may take it as gospel, but overall I’m glad to see people putting their thoughts out there with explanations and examples :)

View on HN

I do think that being opinionated about code style leads to code that's easier to read and maintain. I was just delighted to find someone whose tastes diverged so distinctly from my own in a smaller language community.

Aside from using an automated formatter/linter, I think being opinionated about code style is only really sustainable for single person projects. Otherwise it leads to inconsistent code reviews where people are making changes for reasons they can't understand.

It's one thing to be opinionated about code styles, but I would argue that doing so when those opinions go against standard idioms is a recipe for disaster.

If I ran across a lot of these suggestions in code, I'd refactor them to be more idiomatic/practical.

But how do you take this to a code review scenario? Are these suggestions that you can take or ignore?

Most of those in the article you can ignore and get away with it for a long time. Some of them start to become problematic once the code grows quite a lot, others are not a problem ever because they are very dependent on the context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com