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While I agree with you in general (i.e. educate people or just stay silent instead of pontificating/be condescending if not rude), what would you say about the

• mlevental 8y ago
  meh. the tone isn't so bad but, while at first i thought otherwise, it doesn't really comprehensively explain why it's a bad idea (on first skim i thought most of the content of the answer was an explanation of the difference between a state machine and cfg or something like that). i think a good model for how to answer questions like this is really the same as you'd answer kids' questions as a parent (or maybe anyone's questions?): a flat out no is completely unsatisfactory and lazy. a no with a measured explanation is good.
  • Pamar 8y ago
    Again, agreed. But what when something is at the same time pretty much wrong but also something that everyone tries to do because superficially looks like a good idea? The reaction on StackOverflow was because they were getting dozens (hundreds) more or less identical copies of the same question. It was the same with "parse email via regexp" but I understand that more recent versions of the RFC make this doable.