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I agree with the author, but saying "best practice" in a group discussion is frequently used to make someone's position sound more official. "Industry standard"
by Smeevy 5y ago
I agree with the author, but saying "best practice" in a group discussion is frequently used to make someone's position sound more official. "Industry standard" gets used the same way. Some people think that saying these things is like pressing an "I get what I want" button.
I have to fight the urge to ask for citations whenever I see someone pull out one of these chestnuts. Rather than be contentious, I just think about whether or not their argument needs the extra oomph of authority that they're trying to give it. My hope is that not rewarding disingenuity reduces its power.
- tsuujin 5y agoThis is a pet peeve of mine, but it’s so ingrained into dev culture that it seems impossible to stop. We could have a little bit of intellectual integrity and at least say “good” instead of “best” but we won’t. We also use it to argue for opinion over empirical data points. E.g., tabs vs spaces. The “best practice” is some arbitrary number of spaces because “alignment”; this ignores entirely a substantial argument for tabs in the form of accessibility—you can make a tab whatever width you want, so if you’re visually impaired you don’t have to modify the code to read it and re-format it to the “best practice”. TLDR; tab indentation followed by space alignment would actually satisfy everyone’s needs, but it’s totally off the table because “best practice” is spaces.