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This is an interesting comment. I found myself alternating between your sentences with strong agreement and strong disagreement. Sometimes even alternating stat

This is an interesting comment. I found myself alternating between your sentences with strong agreement and strong disagreement. Sometimes even alternating statements within sentences. Laziness? +1000 Best practices? -1000 Work inside the box? -1000 Think ahead about maintenance and things fitting together? +1000 Unusual choices? -1000 Polish/compatibility over great ideas? +1000 I think the common thread between my "-1000s" might be driven by a lot of experiences I've had where the boxes, default choices, and "best practices" (I cannot express how much I hate this term) have been dressing put around awful ideas. Maybe if I'd been in more scenarios where "best practices" really were good choices I'd agree with you 100%, but I've just seen too many cases where bad decisions are the default :/. I assume you've seen otherwise?

eternityforest 5y ago
Nope, I have seen tons of times where standards are very disappointing. Even USB-C, which I love, has tons of annoyances if you look at it on it's own. Most wireless protocols have something in them that kind of sucks. WiFi at one point didn't even have active TX power control. The value of best practices isn't that they're actually "best", just that they're standard. We are slowly getting to a point where there are some standards that are crap, like Container Mania that has taken over everything, and putting a blockchain in stuff just because, or the inexplicable use of real databases where SQLite would be entirely appropriate. But a lot of pretty good stuff gets done just by sticking with best practices. Like, no, it's not ideal to have an 80MB app to flash SD cards. But it works. It's on all common platforms. And it's fairly safe. And it has notifications, important on a tight schedule. I can recommend it to anyone knowing they probably won't wipe their disk. That 80MB Electron app may be ridiculous, but it makes flashing solved. Or Git. There are other version control systems. Maybe better ones. But currently, almost all programmers need to know the basics of Git anyway, and for simple projects there are GUI tools. Anything else has to be weighed against the fact that git is already everywhere and nobody has to learn a second system, and the fact that Github and GitLab exist. Or my favorite, JS. As a language, it's a bit crappy, at least compared to Python. But it's in the browser. TypeScript makes it safer. It's got great performance with a JIT and standardized access to lots of stuff, and we have reactive HTML and NPM project management. And it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. All the extra stuff makes the dev experience sometimes pretty amazing despite the language itself being mediocre.

eternityforest 5y ago

Nope, I have seen tons of times where standards are very disappointing. Even USB-C, which I love, has tons of annoyances if you look at it on it's own. Most wireless protocols have something in them that kind of sucks. WiFi at one point didn't even have active TX power control. The value of best practices isn't that they're actually "best", just that they're standard. We are slowly getting to a point where there are some standards that are crap, like Container Mania that has taken over everything, and putting a blockchain in stuff just because, or the inexplicable use of real databases where SQLite would be entirely appropriate. But a lot of pretty good stuff gets done just by sticking with best practices. Like, no, it's not ideal to have an 80MB app to flash SD cards. But it works. It's on all common platforms. And it's fairly safe. And it has notifications, important on a tight schedule. I can recommend it to anyone knowing they probably won't wipe their disk. That 80MB Electron app may be ridiculous, but it makes flashing solved. Or Git. There are other version control systems. Maybe better ones. But currently, almost all programmers need to know the basics of Git anyway, and for simple projects there are GUI tools. Anything else has to be weighed against the fact that git is already everywhere and nobody has to learn a second system, and the fact that Github and GitLab exist. Or my favorite, JS. As a language, it's a bit crappy, at least compared to Python. But it's in the browser. TypeScript makes it safer. It's got great performance with a JIT and standardized access to lots of stuff, and we have reactive HTML and NPM project management. And it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. All the extra stuff makes the dev experience sometimes pretty amazing despite the language itself being mediocre.