[gkafkg8y8]

> Definitely read the comments.

I agree. I'm very senior now, bordering on ancient (or at least in the last part of the age tail), and especially over the past 8-10 years (perhaps back to 18 years if you consider the explosion of OOP/OOD and Java to be a tagalong trend) group-think has been a serious problem in development.

The problem with group-think is that that it isn't moderate thinking that is an average of all well-informed people. It can be influenced by a few that have good design skills and say things in a way that people want to believe. I personally have just said whatever came to mind, bullshitting because I was bored, and got many karma points for comments that I'd not thought out, and have definitely seen other comments that were similar. This is especially true when you are shooting down what could be good ideas. A lot of us just like to argue for arguments' sake. Now, a lot of times that is good, but it is very important to try things out that you on your own think are reasonable and see for yourself.

For example, what if HN had been around when PhP was developed and a group of bored naysayers had shot it down because it wasn't organized enough and would promote bad practices. Those things were true- you could write bad PhP code. However, a lot of what exists today was born of people just having fun coding in PhP, and those people wouldn't have learned from their time in PhP, because it never would have come about.

[marcosdumay]

There's a famous saying about it... But, anyway, it's best to have a bias into believing a well articulated comment saying something is viable or useful, and into doubting a well articulated comment saying something is not viable or useless.