10 controversial programming opinions? | Hacker News Reader

10 controversial programming opinions?

pixelstech.net

17 pointssonic000212 comments

Alright, lets do this.

1） The only “best practice” you should be using all the time is “Use Your Brain”. If working on individual projects, sure. The problem is that best practices are an opinionated collection of tradeoffs. There are often other alternatives that may be better tradeoffs to work with for the situation. Most of the time, these tradeoffs involve coding style rather than any real functionality changes. At that point, whichever you advocate - either your own thought, or a "best practice" is going to cause disagreements among people. The "best practice" then, is a good option simply because you have a lot of public support behind it for whatever reason, so hopefully the people who disagree with that particular practice will be convinced to work with it. Counter-arguments?

I'm sorry if this is a stupid question... but what's wrong with "googling it"? I can see the flipside to most of the points made, but I don't understand this one.

As much as I don't like google, I must say that I find google to be a programmers best friend (you google for it and find the stackoverflow questions you were looking for. SO's search is much inferior to Google's IMO and I can never make it work)

Yea I mean, I feel like when people say "google it", they're conveying that you should search the internet/research about it, not necessarily use Google for it.

Well, "Googling it" could also mean a programmers that copy/pastes codes from various sources found on the internet when faced with a problem, instead of trying to understand the problem domain.

I never really thought of it that way, but I guess in that context it makes sense why that's frowned upon.

XML is highly overrated

I don't think XML is overrated but certainly overused and misused.

My first thought when I read that was, "I can't remember the last time I heard someone rate it positively." I would probably have to go back to the days when everyone expected a transition to XHTML, which would end the tyranny of broken HTML markup on the Internet. Perhaps in those days, it had some positive ratings.

Misused is key... The idea of a self-describing data set is pretty cool, and could have a good use if you had to dump a data-set to be consumed by some external 3rd party without any other documentation... (when has that ever happened)

What maddens me is when people use XML to communicate with themselves. It is the biggest waste of bandwidth and processing power, when there are much simpler formats.

Many years ago I took the XAjax library for PHP and re-wrote it without XML.. Using 2 simple delimiters instead, the code was 80% smaller.

"8）Your job is to put yourself out of work." is just another way of saying that laziness is one of the programmers virtues.

Couldn't help noticing this article was right next to "Is it time to stop writing headlines that end in question marks?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3963685

Reply on news.ycombinator.com