

10 controversial programming opinions? - sonic0002
http://www.pixelstech.net/article/index.php?id=1336838538

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zaptheimpaler
Alright, lets do this.

1） The only “best practice” you should be using all the time is “Use Your
Brain”. If working on individual projects, sure. The problem is that best
practices are an opinionated collection of tradeoffs. There are often other
alternatives that may be better tradeoffs to work with for the situation. Most
of the time, these tradeoffs involve coding style rather than any real
functionality changes. At that point, whichever you advocate - either your own
thought, or a "best practice" is going to cause disagreements among people.
The "best practice" then, is a good option simply because you have a lot of
public support behind it for whatever reason, so hopefully the people who
disagree with that particular practice will be convinced to work with it.
Counter-arguments?

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thebrokencube
I'm sorry if this is a stupid question... but what's wrong with "googling it"?
I can see the flipside to most of the points made, but I don't understand this
one.

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pooriaazimi
As much as I don't like google, I must say that I find google to be a
programmers best friend (you google for it and find the stackoverflow
questions you were looking for. SO's search is much inferior to Google's IMO
and I can never make it work)

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thebrokencube
Yea I mean, I feel like when people say "google it", they're conveying that
you should search the internet/research about it, not necessarily use Google
for it.

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valinor4
XML is highly overrated

I don't think XML is overrated but certainly overused and misused.

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gfosco
Misused is key... The idea of a self-describing data set is pretty cool, and
could have a good use if you had to dump a data-set to be consumed by some
external 3rd party without any other documentation... (when has that ever
happened)

What maddens me is when people use XML to communicate with themselves. It is
the biggest waste of bandwidth and processing power, when there are much
simpler formats.

Many years ago I took the XAjax library for PHP and re-wrote it without XML..
Using 2 simple delimiters instead, the code was 80% smaller.

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justncase80
"8）Your job is to put yourself out of work." is just another way of saying
that laziness is one of the programmers virtues.

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jayferd
Couldn't help noticing this article was right next to "Is it time to stop
writing headlines that end in question marks?"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3963685>

