2 ms·

Standards suffocate me, as any restrictive device should. Even knowing their importance, especially in mission critical roles such as aerospace and medical, it

Standards suffocate me, as any restrictive device should. Even knowing their importance, especially in mission critical roles such as aerospace and medical, it is hard to reason that all the time and creative energy spent on most standards is worth it. Especially since standards evolve by being broken or ignored, creating flux that makes the standard meaningless. I think the need to form standards are a symptom of poor tools and methodologies for software development. Robust software needs to be built using first principles. Instead of forming standards in such situations to enforce coding style, we should be improving our tooling, and not be writing code at all. The tools are the standard. Code is a creative free form medium, and ignoring its raison d'être means killing what it is. If you need precise coloring within the lines, build and use the right tool - a printer. Don't enforce arbitrary rules on using crayons.

alanctgardner2 14y ago
This is ridiculous; there's certainly a place for creative code. It's an obfuscated code competition. Yes, you can write a BrainFuck interpreter in the C preprocessor. If it was your job, would you do it that way? Would you saddle other people with the work of maintaining your implementation? The second half of your argument is equally vexing. Yes, ideally tools would turn intent into actions. We would think, or express what we want at some high level, and it would come into existence. That's not how the real world works. Painters need to use a brush, musicians need an instrument, or at least sheet music. Some would argue that brushwork is like coding style. But the thing is, do you want to work on a team of Jackson Pollocks?