
50 Lies Programmers Believe - robin_reala
https://tommorris.org/posts/9317
======
boothead

       Reformulating an understandable bug report (“the Froobnicator class throws an
       uncaught exception when the input contains UTF-8”) into a long-winded user story
       (“as a developer, I want to be able to run this software without seeing a 500 line
       stack trace when…”) will magically make it easier to plan work.
    

This is a lie?! Oh my god what are we doing every day!

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k_sze
#50 is the most appalling.

Everybody should just use MacPorts to install npm to install bower.

:P

Joking aside, I have mixed feelings about #3. On the one hand, the current
version of Unicode certainly doesn't cover every character in every known
language yet. On the other hand, it's about the best darn effort the world has
mustered towards a universal encoding.

As far as encoding goes, I don't think it's wrong to rely on Unicode as _the_
solution. In any case, it's better than every country rolling their own
incompatible encoding. Programmers just need to keep in mind that Unicode is
an evolving standard - it's at version 7 as we speak. Besides, Unicode has a
_lot_ of spare code points and all of human civilised history probably hasn't
invented enough glyphs and characters to use them up. If you want to talk
about possible outerspace alien languages, well, you'll have other problems,
and character encoding won't be your first problem.

And if you're worried about the (in)equivalence between, say ß and ss, then
that's a collation problem, and encoding seems the wrong place to solve it
because collation is context-dependent.

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KingMob
#21 has a flipside belief, which is "Type checkers and static analyzers catch
enough bugs that I don't need to write tests".

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64bitbrain
"We now have the one true data representation format: JSON." huh?!!! We just
moved from protobuf to JSON.

~~~
astrodust
JSON is great for a lot of things, but sometimes CSV is better. Sometimes
packed binary is better. JSON for all things is a bad plan.

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eonw
i would strongly argue #4 is not a lie. show me a language with a third
sex/gender, or really any classification system that is widely recognized,
that has more then two options(or three if NA is an option).

~~~
astrodust
There's literally hundreds of examples where a third gender is recognized,
though obviously not to the same degree as the more common male/female
dichotomy:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender)

Even English is starting to adopt a gender-neutral "they" in preference to the
more clinical "it". This is a product of situations where the gender of the
subject is not known or not relevant to the discussion.

~~~
maxerickson
In US English, it's at least borderline offensive to refer to a person as it.
It doesn't make sense to say that "they" is being adopted in place of "it"
(you could say that grammar prescriptivists are losing ground in their efforts
to say that "they" is wrong).

~~~
yellowapple
I'd still much rather invent a pronoun like "xe" than succumb to the
increasingly-popular yet cringeworthy mangling of English grammar required to
mash "they" into the role of a singular pronoun. I'm indeed losing ground -
and sanity - with this view. It's even worse than double-negatives or saying
that something is "so wizard" or the recent Icebreakers commercial about mints
that are "fruit on one side, cool on the other". It's those little things that
make my brain twitch when processing them.

Incidentally, I'm also confused about why so many folks seem to take offense
to "it". Is it because it's impersonal? Or perhaps because it represents
implicit objectification (which I also don't understand, seeing how everything
representable by a concrete noun - and even by most abstract nouns - is
inherently an object)? Or perhaps because it's slightly cacophonous? Or
because it implies a _lack_ of gender rather than a non-binary gender? Would
using "it" as a personal pronoun for someone who lacks _any_ gender identity
be appropriate?

Basically, not only is "they" wrong grammatically, but it also fails at it's
job and makes little sense semantically. If both genders of a traditionally-
binary gender system are expressed, then a new pronoun (like "xe") seems
appropriate. If neither gender is expressed, then a neuter pronoun like "it"
seems appropriate. If some third gender is expressed, then - like with dual-
gender pronouning - creating a new pronoun to represent this seems to be
necessary (how about "ve" or "fe" or "te" or something else that looks like
"he" or "she" or "xe"?).

In other words, extending the English language to account for a more modern
representation of gender needs to be consistent with the rest of the language.
"They" breaks language parsing too significantly to be a worthwhile long-term
solution.

~~~
astrodust
The problem here is that "it" tends to not just de-genderize, but de-humanize
at the same time. "It" is a term used for machinery, for inanimate objects.
Some even prefer to use "it" for animals even when their gender is obvious.

Personally I kind of bristle at the idea of someone being called "it", even
when they've insisted on being androgynous. Lacking a better option, "they"
steps in to fill the gap.

I also can't stand the idea of "xe" catching on. Is that "che" or "ze" or
chay?" It seems like the very sort of thing Tumblr's hive mind might churn
out.

~~~
yellowapple
Perhaps it's just because I consider humans to be machines (or at least
minimally different from other animals, which tend to be referred to as "it"
when a gender is unknown) that I don't also bristle at the idea of someone
being called "it". I call squirrels and dogs and dolphins and giraffes "it",
so why should humans get special treatment?

I bristle more at the use of a plural pronoun for a singular entity, which
would be the case by adopting "they" as such a pronoun. To me, it implies even
more impersonality by lumping folks whose gender is indeterminate or non-
binary into a plural group, as if only people in the male/female binary
deserve a singular, personal pronoun. That, to me, seems more wrong than "it".

Once upon a time, "he" was usable in gender-neutral contexts in the same way
that "man" was equated to "human" rather than "male" (i.e. the "generic he").
If the words "she" and "woman" hadn't been introduced (and if certain lawyers
had taken "he" and "man" by their intended, original meanings rather than
those in common vernacular), we'd be avoiding all sorts of problems, but
seeing as that cat's already out of the bag, we now need a proper neuter
singular third-person pronoun to replace "he". I don't particularly care for
"xe" either (though I can see where the precedent comes from; some countries -
like Australia - have formally recognized an 'X' gender for those who fall
outside the male/female binary system), but so far it's the best we've come up
with that doesn't make English even _less_ grammatically consistent than it
already is.

I personally use "one" in a lot of these circumstances, however; while it,
too, lacks perfection, one could use it for a lot of situations where one's
writing would normally include a more typical pronoun.

