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12 (Really) Controversial Programming Opinions

31 points by johndcook 14y ago

siloraptor 14y ago
I disagree with most of them and seemed to be biased towards a specific language the poster of the opinion liked/understood best or against one they disliked.
gnaritas 14y ago
Wow, mostly terrible advice.
- jamesbritt 14y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - warmwaffles 14y ago
    I would also like to hear an explanation. I found many of the topics thought provoking, such as Single Entry Single Exit.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    Well, some of the suggestions have been fairly thoroughly examined by now, and often with quite clear results. For example, anyone who advocates writing only extremely short functions because they leave less room for bugs appears to be wrong in about the same way that someone who thinks that 2+2=5 or that a chainsaw is a good implement for brain surgery is wrong.
  - gnaritas 14y ago
    I find it odd that I have to, other than 7 and 10, which I'm not saying are necessarily always good advice, the rest are just terrible advice that I think are self evidently terrible advice. Experience has taught me nearly exactly the opposite; the advice strikes me as bad programmers who only know one language generalizing their poor procedural skills across domains they don't understand. Of course, that's the point of the article, "Really" controversial. Seems most people voted those opinions down as poor advice, which they're correct in doing.
smartkids 14y ago
13. Most programmers think they know what they're doing but actually are "incompetent". (There are Usenet posts going back to 80's documenting this fact.) How am I defining "incompetent"? In my definition it means writing software that any reasonably skilled hacker can cause to "malfunction", i.e. not perform as expected by the programmer, which depending on the program may or may not present a security risk. The number of "competent" programmers i.e. those whose programs are immune to the acts of reasonably skilled hackers, is very small. They are a rare commodity. In sum, there's lots of reasonably skilled hackers and very few competent pogrammers. There is no licensing body for programmers. Anyone can call themselves a "professional programmer". Note: If a programmer only writes programs for her own use, "competency", as defined above, is all but irrelevent. Whatever works. Controversial, but true.
- cruise02 14y ago
  If you go through the answers on Stack Overflow, the point that "most programmers are incompetent" was made quite frequently. Those that made an effort to support their opinion were highly upvoted (so not that controversial), but many others didn't so they just sat at 0-1 upvotes.
  - smartkids 14y ago
    I hate writing what I just wrote because I know it might offend some people. I'm OK with the "incompetence" (I'm sure I qualify myself), but it's the fact that many of these programmers think they know what they're doing that bugs me. And they are writing software that will be used by other people. They don't want to admit their mistakes or that someone else might understand things they don't. They actually think they are being smart when they are really being stupid. Certainly not looking for "votes" with this one. Although I did get an upvote immediately, then a downvote from, who would have guessed, a closed source developer. I'm not a fan of StackOverflow. There is a lot of stupidity and herd mentality there. It's not where I would look for "competent programmers". Like finding a needle in a haystack.
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  Knuth's code has bugs. NASA's code has bugs. I don't think our species has produced even one nontrivial correct program, much less a programmer who's competent (which I take to mean a large portion of their work is 100% correct). Our profession is passing through the mercury-and-leeches phase medicine once went through. Someday our descendants will look back from their error monad formal proofs or something and cringe at everything we did.
zachgalant 14y ago
I don't agree with many of the points, but having taught a lot of beginners while loops, they are often very confusing to people. I usually end up explaining them like a repeat...until, which usually makes more sense to non-programmers.
structAnkit 14y ago
I do sort of agree with the try/catch criticism. I know what it achieves and why we need it but I don't agree that it's the best or even most intuitive error handling mechanism. I personally prefer returning error messages in place of or alongside expected data structure outputs, such as the common paradigm in JavaScript where async functions return error info (or null) as the first parameter in the supplied callback before returning the actual data (if no error) in the subsequent parameters. I do somewhat agree with the OOP criticism as well. I find the best programming achievable is by mixing strategies and not adhering strictly to any one philosophy. Java's OOP is so inflexible and limiting that it takes a significant amount more effort to get basic work done. It may lead to a somewhat more manageable codebase at first, but I feel experience in your language of choice can bridge the gap between such a strict static-typed language vs a more elegant but potentially messier dynamic-typed language in this respect. Finally I do agree that C should be taught before you learn any other programming language...but not to such a degree that you need to be able to build the best Javascript engine in the world from scratch before you move onto another programming language. The goal of programming is to build software that saves you time, after all - you aren't saving much time with as high a barrier to entry as mastering the fundamentals of C. It is important for theory discussion as well as learning the best way to code a lot of logic in many other languages, but I feel an abstracted language has failed if it hasn't done enough of the work for you to refactor your code properly in the first place. Loop unrolling, seriously? I like that I learned why it's important...but I shouldn't ever have to do that in any decently programmed higher level language.
- Quarrelsome 14y ago
  I don't. Exceptions in general FORCE a developer to deal with the problem. They can slap a developer in the face if they're abusing the API. Error codes on the other hand can be ignored. PutLionInCage(); PokeLionWithStick(); I'd rather PutLionInCage() throws if there is a problem.
  - hackinthebochs 14y ago
    If you need an exception here, you're just a bad programmer. It's your fault you didn't explicitly check that the lock was functional before poking that lion! /s
mediocregopher 14y ago
One that really stood out to me: 6. The use of try/catch exception handling is worse than the use of simple return codes and associated common messaging structures to ferry useful error messages. I think this really depends on the language. In erlang I absolutely hate exceptions because they don't really make sense in a functional language (which let's say erlang is for the sake of this argument). Threads run functions with only the function's parameters as state. It doesn't make sense to have to worry about a function stopping half way through, especially when most functions already pass up tuples looking like {error,E} or {success,S}. If you have to worry about exceptions as well, now you have to handle the error tuple and the exception case, and usually both cases are getting the same code so you have to go make a new function to call for that case. This gets messy. If a thread crashes it crashes, otherwise it should be passing up the error tuple; there's no reason for exceptions. On the other hand I think exceptions make a lot of sense in python, and I think the python community has incorporated them in a standard way which makes sense, so that handling exceptions in python is actually easier then passing back different error codes and what-not (no atoms in python).
6ren 14y ago
There can only be controversy when either the truth isn't clear, or it doesn't matter. If we knew the answer, and it mattered, everyone would do it that way (and those who didn't would lose to those who did). e.g. religious wars: vi vs emacs OO vs fp
- javert 14y ago
  I don't agree at all. I don't think Galileo would agree, either.
nahname 14y ago
Mostly opinions of an angry C programmer. Disagree with all of them. Too context specific. For example, testing. It is generally a good idea, but you don't always want to invest the time if it will have a negative return. Small projects or throw away work are two conditions where this would be true.
- epsylon 14y ago
  These are NOT his opinions but the opinion of several different people who answered the original StackOverflow question. The first one, for example, is obviously a joke.
munin 14y ago
guys, >The first language should NOT be the easy one, it should be >one that sets up the student's mind and prepare it for >serious computer science. >C is perfect for that, it forces students to think about >memory and all the low level stuff, as one low-level programmer to another, I hate to break it to you, but "low level programming" is not "serious computer science". the two have very little to do with each other.
- lucisferre 14y ago
  Ironically C is technically a high level language anyways.
  - heretohelp 14y ago
    'ish. C exists in the middle territory between high (colloquially right now) and "original" low-level programming. By all accounts, virtually any language that operates relatively close to the semantics of the machine in terms of operations and memory (pointers are a standard abstraction in assembler) is a low-level language. The only things that detract from C's low-level credentials are that it is more of a hybrid attempt at grafting a harvard machine onto von neumann machines and its functions. The functions/stack are a bit of an abstraction depending on which architecture you're using. Calling C high level isn't accurate or descriptive, but I'd be willing to concede that it's not truly low-level either if you know enough C to explain why. You don't, though.
    - lucisferre 14y ago
      "You don't, though" Interesting, though I'm not sure how my knowledge of C is relevant to the conversation.
      - heretohelp 14y ago
        You made a false assertion about C. o o o Connect the dots.
shaggyfrog 14y ago
A linkbait, "N Ys that X" content-farmy headline that seems just tailor-made for getting on HN.
- lucisferre 14y ago
  Actually I think that it's a more ironic take on the meaningless links that made the front page (twice I believe) a while ago about some (not so) controversial opinions on software development. I certainly hope no one thought any of these were opinions to be taken seriously.
ScottBurson 14y ago
Really surprised at the amount of hate for Python significant indentation. I've only used Python a little, and I expected to hate that too, but found it wasn't really so bad. I thought my experience was pretty common, and that by now most people either thought it was a great idea or at least found it tolerable. But "it was a bad idea" is currently favored 43 to 5. Maybe not many Pythonistas have seen this page yet.
- gitarr 14y ago
  In my opinion not many Python programmers care for places like stackoverflow, as the language itself has excelent infrastructure to deal with problems and to get ones questions answered quickly without bothering other people. Maybe that's why the vote is so high there. Everyone working with Python a little while won't even think about indentation anymore, it just comes natural. It's not a big deal. Python is often made out in discussions like that to be for begginners only and only amateurs would use it because its slow, not concurrent etc... The truth though is that YouTube, Reddit, Dropbox, Spotify, Discuss, Google, Nasa and many other "real" professionals use Python in a big way. I tend to ignore such trolls.
mongol 14y ago
One opinion of mine is "code is also configuration". If you structure the code right, I see nothing wrong with putting stuff that many people see as configuration in the code. I do Java programming, and I think that frameworks like Spring are overrated. There is nothing very different from stitching together dependency injection with XML than with Java code. It is a pattern, not a framework. But the Spring trend is hard to walk against, it is so strong. I am getting tired of this occupation.
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  I err on the side of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power. While it's true that code is data, arbitrary code is a form of data that's exceptionally hard to analyze or repurpose. Text config rules out stuff like dynamically-composed names of objects and properties (which you can't search-and-replace).
briandear 14y ago
Was this article just one big troll?

31 points by johndcook 14y ago

I disagree with most of them and seemed to be biased towards a specific language the poster of the opinion liked/understood best or against one they disliked.

gnaritas 14y ago

Wow, mostly terrible advice.

jamesbritt 14y ago
Can you elaborate?
- warmwaffles 14y ago
  I would also like to hear an explanation. I found many of the topics thought provoking, such as Single Entry Single Exit.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  Well, some of the suggestions have been fairly thoroughly examined by now, and often with quite clear results. For example, anyone who advocates writing only extremely short functions because they leave less room for bugs appears to be wrong in about the same way that someone who thinks that 2+2=5 or that a chainsaw is a good implement for brain surgery is wrong.
- gnaritas 14y ago
  I find it odd that I have to, other than 7 and 10, which I'm not saying are necessarily always good advice, the rest are just terrible advice that I think are self evidently terrible advice. Experience has taught me nearly exactly the opposite; the advice strikes me as bad programmers who only know one language generalizing their poor procedural skills across domains they don't understand. Of course, that's the point of the article, "Really" controversial. Seems most people voted those opinions down as poor advice, which they're correct in doing.

smartkids 14y ago

13. Most programmers think they know what they're doing but actually are "incompetent". (There are Usenet posts going back to 80's documenting this fact.) How am I defining "incompetent"? In my definition it means writing software that any reasonably skilled hacker can cause to "malfunction", i.e. not perform as expected by the programmer, which depending on the program may or may not present a security risk. The number of "competent" programmers i.e. those whose programs are immune to the acts of reasonably skilled hackers, is very small. They are a rare commodity. In sum, there's lots of reasonably skilled hackers and very few competent pogrammers. There is no licensing body for programmers. Anyone can call themselves a "professional programmer". Note: If a programmer only writes programs for her own use, "competency", as defined above, is all but irrelevent. Whatever works. Controversial, but true.

cruise02 14y ago
If you go through the answers on Stack Overflow, the point that "most programmers are incompetent" was made quite frequently. Those that made an effort to support their opinion were highly upvoted (so not that controversial), but many others didn't so they just sat at 0-1 upvotes.
- smartkids 14y ago
  I hate writing what I just wrote because I know it might offend some people. I'm OK with the "incompetence" (I'm sure I qualify myself), but it's the fact that many of these programmers think they know what they're doing that bugs me. And they are writing software that will be used by other people. They don't want to admit their mistakes or that someone else might understand things they don't. They actually think they are being smart when they are really being stupid. Certainly not looking for "votes" with this one. Although I did get an upvote immediately, then a downvote from, who would have guessed, a closed source developer. I'm not a fan of StackOverflow. There is a lot of stupidity and herd mentality there. It's not where I would look for "competent programmers". Like finding a needle in a haystack.
prodigal_erik 14y ago
Knuth's code has bugs. NASA's code has bugs. I don't think our species has produced even one nontrivial correct program, much less a programmer who's competent (which I take to mean a large portion of their work is 100% correct). Our profession is passing through the mercury-and-leeches phase medicine once went through. Someday our descendants will look back from their error monad formal proofs or something and cringe at everything we did.

zachgalant 14y ago

I don't agree with many of the points, but having taught a lot of beginners while loops, they are often very confusing to people. I usually end up explaining them like a repeat...until, which usually makes more sense to non-programmers.

structAnkit 14y ago

I do sort of agree with the try/catch criticism. I know what it achieves and why we need it but I don't agree that it's the best or even most intuitive error handling mechanism. I personally prefer returning error messages in place of or alongside expected data structure outputs, such as the common paradigm in JavaScript where async functions return error info (or null) as the first parameter in the supplied callback before returning the actual data (if no error) in the subsequent parameters. I do somewhat agree with the OOP criticism as well. I find the best programming achievable is by mixing strategies and not adhering strictly to any one philosophy. Java's OOP is so inflexible and limiting that it takes a significant amount more effort to get basic work done. It may lead to a somewhat more manageable codebase at first, but I feel experience in your language of choice can bridge the gap between such a strict static-typed language vs a more elegant but potentially messier dynamic-typed language in this respect. Finally I do agree that C should be taught before you learn any other programming language...but not to such a degree that you need to be able to build the best Javascript engine in the world from scratch before you move onto another programming language. The goal of programming is to build software that saves you time, after all - you aren't saving much time with as high a barrier to entry as mastering the fundamentals of C. It is important for theory discussion as well as learning the best way to code a lot of logic in many other languages, but I feel an abstracted language has failed if it hasn't done enough of the work for you to refactor your code properly in the first place. Loop unrolling, seriously? I like that I learned why it's important...but I shouldn't ever have to do that in any decently programmed higher level language.

Quarrelsome 14y ago
I don't. Exceptions in general FORCE a developer to deal with the problem. They can slap a developer in the face if they're abusing the API. Error codes on the other hand can be ignored. PutLionInCage(); PokeLionWithStick(); I'd rather PutLionInCage() throws if there is a problem.
- hackinthebochs 14y ago
  If you need an exception here, you're just a bad programmer. It's your fault you didn't explicitly check that the lock was functional before poking that lion! /s

mediocregopher 14y ago

One that really stood out to me: 6. The use of try/catch exception handling is worse than the use of simple return codes and associated common messaging structures to ferry useful error messages. I think this really depends on the language. In erlang I absolutely hate exceptions because they don't really make sense in a functional language (which let's say erlang is for the sake of this argument). Threads run functions with only the function's parameters as state. It doesn't make sense to have to worry about a function stopping half way through, especially when most functions already pass up tuples looking like {error,E} or {success,S}. If you have to worry about exceptions as well, now you have to handle the error tuple and the exception case, and usually both cases are getting the same code so you have to go make a new function to call for that case. This gets messy. If a thread crashes it crashes, otherwise it should be passing up the error tuple; there's no reason for exceptions. On the other hand I think exceptions make a lot of sense in python, and I think the python community has incorporated them in a standard way which makes sense, so that handling exceptions in python is actually easier then passing back different error codes and what-not (no atoms in python).

6ren 14y ago

There can only be controversy when either the truth isn't clear, or it doesn't matter. If we knew the answer, and it mattered, everyone would do it that way (and those who didn't would lose to those who did). e.g. religious wars: vi vs emacs OO vs fp

javert 14y ago
I don't agree at all. I don't think Galileo would agree, either.

nahname 14y ago

Mostly opinions of an angry C programmer. Disagree with all of them. Too context specific. For example, testing. It is generally a good idea, but you don't always want to invest the time if it will have a negative return. Small projects or throw away work are two conditions where this would be true.

epsylon 14y ago
These are NOT his opinions but the opinion of several different people who answered the original StackOverflow question. The first one, for example, is obviously a joke.

munin 14y ago

guys, >The first language should NOT be the easy one, it should be >one that sets up the student's mind and prepare it for >serious computer science. >C is perfect for that, it forces students to think about >memory and all the low level stuff, as one low-level programmer to another, I hate to break it to you, but "low level programming" is not "serious computer science". the two have very little to do with each other.

lucisferre 14y ago
Ironically C is technically a high level language anyways.
- heretohelp 14y ago
  'ish. C exists in the middle territory between high (colloquially right now) and "original" low-level programming. By all accounts, virtually any language that operates relatively close to the semantics of the machine in terms of operations and memory (pointers are a standard abstraction in assembler) is a low-level language. The only things that detract from C's low-level credentials are that it is more of a hybrid attempt at grafting a harvard machine onto von neumann machines and its functions. The functions/stack are a bit of an abstraction depending on which architecture you're using. Calling C high level isn't accurate or descriptive, but I'd be willing to concede that it's not truly low-level either if you know enough C to explain why. You don't, though.
  - lucisferre 14y ago
    "You don't, though" Interesting, though I'm not sure how my knowledge of C is relevant to the conversation.
    - heretohelp 14y ago
      You made a false assertion about C. o o o Connect the dots.

shaggyfrog 14y ago

A linkbait, "N Ys that X" content-farmy headline that seems just tailor-made for getting on HN.

lucisferre 14y ago
Actually I think that it's a more ironic take on the meaningless links that made the front page (twice I believe) a while ago about some (not so) controversial opinions on software development. I certainly hope no one thought any of these were opinions to be taken seriously.

ScottBurson 14y ago

Really surprised at the amount of hate for Python significant indentation. I've only used Python a little, and I expected to hate that too, but found it wasn't really so bad. I thought my experience was pretty common, and that by now most people either thought it was a great idea or at least found it tolerable. But "it was a bad idea" is currently favored 43 to 5. Maybe not many Pythonistas have seen this page yet.

gitarr 14y ago
In my opinion not many Python programmers care for places like stackoverflow, as the language itself has excelent infrastructure to deal with problems and to get ones questions answered quickly without bothering other people. Maybe that's why the vote is so high there. Everyone working with Python a little while won't even think about indentation anymore, it just comes natural. It's not a big deal. Python is often made out in discussions like that to be for begginners only and only amateurs would use it because its slow, not concurrent etc... The truth though is that YouTube, Reddit, Dropbox, Spotify, Discuss, Google, Nasa and many other "real" professionals use Python in a big way. I tend to ignore such trolls.

mongol 14y ago

One opinion of mine is "code is also configuration". If you structure the code right, I see nothing wrong with putting stuff that many people see as configuration in the code. I do Java programming, and I think that frameworks like Spring are overrated. There is nothing very different from stitching together dependency injection with XML than with Java code. It is a pattern, not a framework. But the Spring trend is hard to walk against, it is so strong. I am getting tired of this occupation.

prodigal_erik 14y ago
I err on the side of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power. While it's true that code is data, arbitrary code is a form of data that's exceptionally hard to analyze or repurpose. Text config rules out stuff like dynamically-composed names of objects and properties (which you can't search-and-replace).

briandear 14y ago

Was this article just one big troll?