4 ms·

This boogeyman of "pointless arguments" is so strange. Other than on the internet, I've never experienced pointless bikeshed arguments. So long as within an or

This boogeyman of "pointless arguments" is so strange. Other than on the internet, I've never experienced pointless bikeshed arguments. So long as within an organization you keep the same standards, what difference does it make? Everywhere I've worked does this and it's fine - and allows us to be break from patterns handed down to us from people doing a different job.

spyspy 8y ago
Because enforcing it within a reasonably sized organization is still a tall problem. I can't even be trusted to follow my own style preferences from time to time. All it takes is one rogue new employee who doesn't know better and now we have to rehash the same arguments again to teach them a lesson - and the lesson is rarely "this other way is better", it usually boils down to "just do it our way and shut up about it".
- staticassertion 8y ago
  Really? Just have your CI reject builds that don't lint...
  - XorNot 8y ago
    Exactly this. The beautiful thing about machine checked formatting and linting is that it's consistent, and the ask to conform to it is generally not onerous. If someone wants to make that the hill they die on, I would argue you're now into culture-fit issues with the employee not the process. This is, in sharp contrast I would add, to all my experience with code-reviews where colleagues are making style criticisms at the same time, which is an utterly useless experience that devalues the entire code review activity.
shabbyrobe 8y ago
That's your anecdata though, mine's very very different indeed. Many of the places I've worked have either actively fought attempts to get some consistency in place, or have lapsed into total anarchy, even in some cases with edit wars showing up in the Git history. It's horrible, and I'm glad you've been able to avoid it. Go's way is better - those things just can't happen. There's a network effect too. Sooner or later you'll start to notice that not only does all your organisation's code look consistent, dependencies you pull in look extremely consistent too, as if other organisations were following the same interpretation of the Golden Rule yours is following. This has enormous benefits when you're assessing the quality of a dependency because once again, you get to walk straight past the same thousand pointless and distracting arguments you got to walk past internally (well, not you of course, but those of us who have been stuck having them!) and get right to the meat of the quality of the code you're assessing for inclusion. "Are the idioms sensible? Are the errors being propagated correctly? Is the public API neat and tidy?" That stuff, the real stuff, is all visible much more quickly when you're not rage-twitching because some other developer from some other team on the other side of the world likes to put the curly brace on a new line at the same indent level as the function body. I had never experienced this unique benefit with any language ecosystem I worked with before Go and I'm loath to leave it behind. I'm incredibly heartened to see tools like Prettier and Black making strides in the Javascript and Python communities respectively.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
org3432 8y ago
Nope, the point is that it's a global assumption, we did this "customer to my org" thing with C and C++ already, time to move on.

spyspy 8y ago

Because enforcing it within a reasonably sized organization is still a tall problem. I can't even be trusted to follow my own style preferences from time to time. All it takes is one rogue new employee who doesn't know better and now we have to rehash the same arguments again to teach them a lesson - and the lesson is rarely "this other way is better", it usually boils down to "just do it our way and shut up about it".

staticassertion 8y ago
Really? Just have your CI reject builds that don't lint...
- XorNot 8y ago
  Exactly this. The beautiful thing about machine checked formatting and linting is that it's consistent, and the ask to conform to it is generally not onerous. If someone wants to make that the hill they die on, I would argue you're now into culture-fit issues with the employee not the process. This is, in sharp contrast I would add, to all my experience with code-reviews where colleagues are making style criticisms at the same time, which is an utterly useless experience that devalues the entire code review activity.

shabbyrobe 8y ago

That's your anecdata though, mine's very very different indeed. Many of the places I've worked have either actively fought attempts to get some consistency in place, or have lapsed into total anarchy, even in some cases with edit wars showing up in the Git history. It's horrible, and I'm glad you've been able to avoid it. Go's way is better - those things just can't happen. There's a network effect too. Sooner or later you'll start to notice that not only does all your organisation's code look consistent, dependencies you pull in look extremely consistent too, as if other organisations were following the same interpretation of the Golden Rule yours is following. This has enormous benefits when you're assessing the quality of a dependency because once again, you get to walk straight past the same thousand pointless and distracting arguments you got to walk past internally (well, not you of course, but those of us who have been stuck having them!) and get right to the meat of the quality of the code you're assessing for inclusion. "Are the idioms sensible? Are the errors being propagated correctly? Is the public API neat and tidy?" That stuff, the real stuff, is all visible much more quickly when you're not rage-twitching because some other developer from some other team on the other side of the world likes to put the curly brace on a new line at the same indent level as the function body. I had never experienced this unique benefit with any language ecosystem I worked with before Go and I'm loath to leave it behind. I'm incredibly heartened to see tools like Prettier and Black making strides in the Javascript and Python communities respectively.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

org3432 8y ago

Nope, the point is that it's a global assumption, we did this "customer to my org" thing with C and C++ already, time to move on.