127 karma · joined January 27, 2014
On one hand it's nice that there are tools to support devs who get lost in their undo-redo history, on the other I feel like it's a matter of good habits to not even have this problem.
of course changing habits is hard, so maybe tooling is justified in this case. I'm just happy I don't have nother "history" type mental model to deal with.
If you have to maintain tests written by other devs you might start to care. Devs apply different patterns to writing tests and show different amounts of discipline doing so. Some produce lots of duplication ("it doesn't matter, it's just a unit test"), others prefer a complete setup and tear-down before and after every little assertion. I've seen things..
But the point remains: Just reading the book, as in consuming page after page, is not enough.
I'd argue that most relational DB users are familiar with a programming language, and therefore most likely familiar with the C-style syntax. It's better to build on something that most of the potentials users are familiar with already.
> There is no distinction between noun "users" and verb "find".
There is no such distinction in natural language either (if you see words purely as sequences of characters), you have to know what is what and infer it from the context.
> even educated non-programmers are gonna be able to read the SQL as SELECT "these things" FROM "this table" WHERE "these conditions are true".
Yeah SQL looks a bit more like natural language at first glance, but that's about it. That familiarity is a false friend, it doesn't really help with the learning curve.
This kind of thinking reminds me of the ruby community trend a decade ago when DSLs were created to look beautiful and like written language. It's useless and confusing for long-term, practical purposes. Same with BDD style testing languages. The promise that non-technical people will feel right at home and can start contributing rarely lives up to reality.
"I needed something to convert markdown to html", "I like the component mental model", "I wanted to use Node libraries for date formatting etc.", "Next has a great developer experience"
None of these justify using React. It all boils down to "I'm doing it because I can and I'm familiar with those tools".