
What unpopular opinions do you have about software development? - jgrahamc
https://www.quora.com/What-unpopular-opinions-do-you-have-about-software-development?share=1
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krapp
Come at me, scrubs.

\- Languages which "compile to javascript" are little more than linters with
delusions of grandeur.

\- Significant whitespace is still syntax. Replacing brackets with non-
printable characters only offers the illusion of elegance, at the expense of
legibility and explicitness.

\- PHP and Javascript may be terrible as general purpose languages, but
they're very good at their intended purpose.

\- There is no moral dimension to software licensing. FOSS software is not
fundamentally good, and proprietary software is not fundamentally evil.

\- The web is actually much better now than it was in the 90s.

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Safety1stClyde
The following opinion proved quite unpopular on Hacker news:

"If I was going to try machine learning I would code up from scratch rather
than relying on black boxes."

Another one, a preference for Python (or Go, or Rust, or whatever it is next
week) is due to its fashionability, rather than any intrinsic merit of the
language.

See also this discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057953](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057953)

~~~
PaulHoule
I would disagree with that one.

I worked on a neural network product that was coded in C++. It worked, and it
came out early, before deep learning got bigger than beatlemania.

It used intrinsics​ to incorporate SIMD instructions, thus it was tied to a
particular processor version. I seemed to be the only person who noticed or
cared if the derivatives were calculated correctly, or to implement
constraints with Lagrange multipliers rather than wishful thinking. Once we
got it working we would be crazy to change anything.

Thus tensorflow, keras, and similar tools can save you a lot of grief.

~~~
Safety1stClyde
> I seemed to be the only person who noticed or cared if the derivatives were
> calculated correctly, or to implement constraints with Lagrange multipliers
> rather than wishful thinking.

In other words, it was a black box.

~~~
PaulHoule
It may have been to the people who made it. I was the one who had to
understand it in order to make it ready to go in front of the customer.

------
Sunset
Violations of software licensing are irrelevant. What matters is how useful
the end result is to the end-user.

If you violate every copyright law in the books, I still wouldn't care as long
as your program does what I need to get done to get on with my work/life.

