I used the word extreme in the assembly language argument to indicate that I understood you weren't actually advocating people program in assembly. So I don't

I used the word extreme in the assembly language argument to indicate that I understood you weren't actually advocating people program in assembly. So I don't consider it a straw man. Rather, it was an example of extremely flexible control flow. Sometimes this is what you need. Sometimes you need to modify the stack so that a function is called in a different way. Sometimes gotos can provide significantly more efficient code. Sometimes vtables are too expensive. Rails is at the opposite end of the spectrum, it is very rigid. As a refutation to your argument against rigid code, a lot of people consider Rails code to be debuggable and maintainable. Personally, I like a middle ground and try to be aware of the costs and benefits of making and using cookie cutters, an example of which is chained ?:. I was not asking questions to "destroy your argument", I was trying to establish different contributors to rigidity / flexibility. It seemed to me that in your argument you were dismissing rigidity - certainly you weren't praising it - and I wanted to point out that in the use of any control flow more complicated than test and branch you are in fact relying on rigidity. If this is a "straw man" in your eyes, then so be it. Having functions introduces rigidity! Even if-else enforces some things. If anything, I was just actually interested in the topic, because I hadn't really thought much about the tradeoffs of rigid vs. flexible in those specific terms and I wanted to explore them a bit. What if I revealed myself to you, and then you were like, oh shit, I better take what he says a little bit more seriously, wouldn't that just be embarrassing? I don't want to do that to you.