This should probably be a Red Meat Friday post but I have nothing else to write about today. Anton Zaides has a list of five pieces of received wisdom that we should abandon. We calls them dogmas but I call them silliness. I can’t remember every taking any of them seriously.
Some of them, like
If a comment is needed, the code is too complex
are ridiculous on their face and could only be believed by those too lazy to do their job properly and make sure their code is comprehensible by commenting the non-obvious parts. Others, such as
2-4 week sprints are how modern teams work
are sure to gore some oxen but they’re oxen that need to be gored.
Perhaps the worst piece of advice is to not reinvent the wheel; use packages instead. We’ve already seen the disasters that come from that. There’s no reason at all to be creating a dependency for trivial functions. If that’s not enough, take a look at the is-even package described in Zaides’ post.
The whole post is sort of depressing. Just a little thought shows that all five items are silly yet they continue to be received wisdom. It’s time to put them to rest and start thinking for ourselves.