[yycom]

> And if you can't depend on it, why have it?

That's a bit rich. There are other conventions in programming that you can't depend on technically but serve a real purpose. Identifier naming and comments are the first that come to mind.

If a language gives you a choice of token that has no semantic distinction then different people will adopt different semantics by convention.

As an aside, calling a tool "opinionated" is code for "my conventions are better than yours". That's fine if I don't have any conventions or I can't decide, but if I have decided, then it's just offensive.

[zestyping]

Sometimes it's helpful just to have a decision; any decision, followed consistently, is better than no decision or continued debate. This is one of those situations.

So I don't read "opinionated" to necessarily mean "better than your opinions"; it's more like "makes decisions for you so you can avoid the cost of debating them."

[yycom]

And what if I have already incurred the cost and am happy with my decisions, and they differ to yours? I now cannot use your potentially useful tool, even if 90% of our decisions do accord with each other. That's disappointing.

[jrs95]

Comments are often a side of poorly written code though. Ideallly the name and structure of the program should make the intent and purpose obvious, which eliminates the need for a lot of the comments people leave. Of course this isn’t always true, but if you’re using comments to compensate for bad/confusing code, you shouldn’t think you’re doing “the right thing”.