3 ms·

Avoid rules, use your judgment.

joekrill 9y ago
That's awful advice. Obviously _someone_ has to use their judgement to _create_ the rules. But if you have a large codebase that lots of people are interacting with, letting everyone "use their judgement" is going to create an unreadable mess of code, because you're going to have different patterns and approaches all over the place. It would be like writing a book and one paragraph is in English, the next in Spanish, the third in French, then the fourth goes back to Spanish, and on and on.
- jimjimjim 9y ago
  Dogma
- chaboud 9y ago
  I worked in a shop that lived by "use your judgement", and it was really the cleanest body of code that I've ever worked in with more than 30 people, in 20 years of professional coding. Why? Because people with bad judgement were mercilessly brow-beaten into developing better judgement. We had lots of different styles of code hanging around, and you could tell if code had been written by our CTO, our leads, different guys in different teams, etc. The one rule was "write like a chameleon, and make your code look like the code it is in." (okay... to make that work, the other was "spaces, not tabs") The code was generally very readable, and it was a very adult codebase. The problem with hard rules is that comprehensive codification of complete rulesets is fundamentally intractable. You're always going to run into areas that don't fit, or the ruleset will be laughably overwrought (and, thus, impossible to put into practice). You could call it the code-zealot incompleteness theorem... Of course, if I get to make all the rules and have no obligation to be complete, consistent, or considerate, I can get on board with this plan.
  - matwood 9y ago
    > The one rule was "write like a chameleon, and make your code look like the code it is in." I bounce between many code bases in multiple languages, and this has always been my rule. I first figure out why/how are things done, and then do them the same way within reason. If the existing code has something done in a way that is no longer valid/correct, then we have discussion about changing all of the code.
eropple 9y ago
"Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules." - Strunk, The Elements of Style Your advice is unfortunately common but misguided. Without a firm and intuitive grasp of "rules" and why they exist, one cannot build a framework for making decisions with which one can use their judgment. On top of that, most programmers aren't advanced enough to have more reliable judgment than "the rules" and few working groups can possibly survive a bunch of programmers "using their judgment" all over a nontrivial codebase even when those programmers are that advanced.
- jandrese 9y ago
  "Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules." - Guy who wrote the rule book A better way of saying it might be: If you don't understand why the rule exists and don't have time to learn, follow the rule. When you follow the rule you may discover why it exists, when you don't follow the rule you will almost certainly discover why it exists.
jobigoud 9y ago
Judgment is subjective so this pattern fails when there are more than one person reading the code or the same person at different time. You end up with code written in several different styles within the same codebase. Assumptions that don't hold, etc. Much harder to reason about and maintain.

That's awful advice. Obviously _someone_ has to use their judgement to _create_ the rules. But if you have a large codebase that lots of people are interacting with, letting everyone "use their judgement" is going to create an unreadable mess of code, because you're going to have different patterns and approaches all over the place. It would be like writing a book and one paragraph is in English, the next in Spanish, the third in French, then the fourth goes back to Spanish, and on and on.

jimjimjim 9y ago
Dogma
chaboud 9y ago
I worked in a shop that lived by "use your judgement", and it was really the cleanest body of code that I've ever worked in with more than 30 people, in 20 years of professional coding. Why? Because people with bad judgement were mercilessly brow-beaten into developing better judgement. We had lots of different styles of code hanging around, and you could tell if code had been written by our CTO, our leads, different guys in different teams, etc. The one rule was "write like a chameleon, and make your code look like the code it is in." (okay... to make that work, the other was "spaces, not tabs") The code was generally very readable, and it was a very adult codebase. The problem with hard rules is that comprehensive codification of complete rulesets is fundamentally intractable. You're always going to run into areas that don't fit, or the ruleset will be laughably overwrought (and, thus, impossible to put into practice). You could call it the code-zealot incompleteness theorem... Of course, if I get to make all the rules and have no obligation to be complete, consistent, or considerate, I can get on board with this plan.
- matwood 9y ago
  > The one rule was "write like a chameleon, and make your code look like the code it is in." I bounce between many code bases in multiple languages, and this has always been my rule. I first figure out why/how are things done, and then do them the same way within reason. If the existing code has something done in a way that is no longer valid/correct, then we have discussion about changing all of the code.

eropple 9y ago

"Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules." - Strunk, The Elements of Style Your advice is unfortunately common but misguided. Without a firm and intuitive grasp of "rules" and why they exist, one cannot build a framework for making decisions with which one can use their judgment. On top of that, most programmers aren't advanced enough to have more reliable judgment than "the rules" and few working groups can possibly survive a bunch of programmers "using their judgment" all over a nontrivial codebase even when those programmers are that advanced.

jandrese 9y ago
"Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules." - Guy who wrote the rule book A better way of saying it might be: If you don't understand why the rule exists and don't have time to learn, follow the rule. When you follow the rule you may discover why it exists, when you don't follow the rule you will almost certainly discover why it exists.

jobigoud 9y ago

Judgment is subjective so this pattern fails when there are more than one person reading the code or the same person at different time. You end up with code written in several different styles within the same codebase. Assumptions that don't hold, etc. Much harder to reason about and maintain.