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So what in the language prevented them from doing it that way? What in the community ensured they didn't do it that way? Firefox is open source, and yet it stil

So what in the language prevented them from doing it that way? What in the community ensured they didn't do it that way? Firefox is open source, and yet it still happened. "Best practices" is such a red herring. Best practices = don't write bugs, too; yet there are bugs. You can't evaluate a language in theory and ignore what happens in practice any more than you can with any other thing in life. It's the UX, does it do what users expect it to do, and is that the lowest friction path possible to achieve the goal. "You're not following best practices" is basically "you're holding it wrong". While arguably true, it is an attempt to excuse a bad design decision or impedance mismatch.

dxuh 6y ago
> "Best practices = don't write bugs" That's absolutely not what it means. Best practices usually means "don't use these features anymore" and "use these features whenever you can". And that is very reasonable and DOES get rid of a lot of the problems (not all) that are usually associated with C++, but still people don't do it. I blame it many C++-people actually preferring "C with classes" (various code bases openly prefers this as their coding style - you won't get those people on the Rust train either) and many people just don't know or don't trust it, because some of the newer features are sadly not very easy to understand properly.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  You clearly missed the facetious tone of that part, along with the entire rest of the post. So let me simplify - if to use a language correctly requires knowing the full history of the language, along with explicitly eschewing some of the key features of the language (except in certain cases when you need them! And they're not deprecated or issue warnings or similar by the compiler), and even extremely experienced developers using the language still make mistakes...the issue is with the language.

dxuh 6y ago

> "Best practices = don't write bugs" That's absolutely not what it means. Best practices usually means "don't use these features anymore" and "use these features whenever you can". And that is very reasonable and DOES get rid of a lot of the problems (not all) that are usually associated with C++, but still people don't do it. I blame it many C++-people actually preferring "C with classes" (various code bases openly prefers this as their coding style - you won't get those people on the Rust train either) and many people just don't know or don't trust it, because some of the newer features are sadly not very easy to understand properly.

lostcolony 6y ago
You clearly missed the facetious tone of that part, along with the entire rest of the post. So let me simplify - if to use a language correctly requires knowing the full history of the language, along with explicitly eschewing some of the key features of the language (except in certain cases when you need them! And they're not deprecated or issue warnings or similar by the compiler), and even extremely experienced developers using the language still make mistakes...the issue is with the language.