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0 pointsbb885y ago0 comments

> you'd set up standards everyone can agree on and understand with rubocop or prettier-rb

Things like that just often lead to bikeshedding. And then worse, powerful voices may approve ideas that work for them and not everyone else, or even more worse crippling a language to be too safe or bland to be truly useful.

I got into an argument a couple weeks ago whether an unprotected eval() in python should make it's way into production code of a fortune 500 company. The coder's argument was that, "Well the language has it so why not use it?"

"Because with great power, comes great responsibility..."

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d3nj4l5y ago

That's a problem with culture, not with the language. You can't say "you can get into accidents if you drive a car, so you're not allowed to drive"; you try to fix it by setting rules into place. At any rate, if you don't like bikeshedding, there's great, well appreciated standards in place for ruby which you can take up as-is: there's AirBnB, standard-rb/ prettier-rb and rubocop's default config. No bikeshedding involved, pick one and run with it

bb88OP5y ago

Which culture are you talking about? Company culture or programming culture?

My understanding was the general bikeshedding around formatting was the reason gofmt won for golang. That seems to hint the problem is a programming wide culture. Just in the same historical context programmers have had around tabs vs spaces...

riffraff5y ago

> And then worse, powerful voices may approve ideas that work for them and not everyone else, or even more worse crippling a language to be too safe or bland to be truly useful.

but that same thing will happen if the powerful voices are the ones taking the decisions for the whole language.

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