[trey-jones]

I think Opinionated can be good. I think configurable can be good too. I think the best case is nearly always "Configurable, with smart defaults" meaning defaults that work out of the box for most uses.

Definitely programming languages are on the periphery of this conversation, but I think provide some good examples of why I like opinionated tools in general.

My language of choice right now is Go, and has been for a while. One of the things I like about it is that it's a bit opinionated. For example:

Braces around `if` statements aren't optional. I prefer this to other C-Like languages that allow you to leave out braces for one-liners.

Also the document "Effective Go" exists, which lays out the canonical "best" ways of doing a lot of things. The language doesn't force you to do these things, but there is an authoritative source that makes good suggestions.

The Antithesis of opinionated languages in my opinion is Ruby. I personally hate Ruby, but I know there are a lot of people that love it. I hate it because there are too many ways to of accomplishing the same tax, and to me this makes it harder to read. Go, on the other hand is the easiest language for me to read, largely because of `gofmt`, another thing that doesn't force you to do it a certain way, but strongly encourages a standard end result.

[jerf]

"My language of choice right now is Go, and has been for a while. One of the things I like about it is that it's a bit opinionated."

I've frequently described Go as a very, very good 1990s language. Going through the process of maturity takes time. You can't have a "very, very good" 2020s language right now, because at the frontier we're still feeling our way through the issues.

(Remember, whatever you're about to hit reply with and try to contradict me about it being a totally smooth and polished 2020s language that's already here is also an assertion that your example basically has no room for improvement and will not improve in the next 10-20 years. Consider your options carefully before you go too "language partisan" here.)

I believe probably >75% of the hatred Go engenders is from people afraid that Go's success will erase or invalidate the 2010s/2020s languages they prefer, because otherwise, the solution to most of these people's hate/anxiety would be to just ignore Go. To which I can say to those people, you can stop worrying. It won't. And if you stay in the industry long enough, maybe someday you'll get to use the really good and polished 2010s or 2020s language. No idea what it'll be called. And you can similarly assuage the fears of the day that this new language will erase all the benefits of the 2040s languages in development at the time.

But for "opinionated" to really work, I think you intrinsically need to have years of experience to make the right calls. There's no realistic chance that we could have gone straight to the "correct" VPN choice in one shot. Too many variables, too many dimensions, too much to learn and know about the security. It's just not possible. We collectively need the decades.

[Latty]

I agree that programming languages are an interesting to view over that axis.

I've done a fair amount with Elm, which is undoubtedly hugely opinionated, doing things like locking JavaScript interop behind a message passing system and baking protection from XSS into the language.

Mostly I'd say this all encourages you to do things a better way, but it can be painful, and particularly given the early nature of the language, meeting the edges of the language can be very painful because of it.

In contrast, I adored working with Scala because it was so powerful, but it sits close to Ruby in the "you can do everything a million different ways" rankings. The more I did with it, the more I wanted a refined subset of what was there (which may be what Dotty/Scala 3 ends up being).

Things like "you must always use braces on if statements" are rules I always end up enforcing using tooling anyway because they are just bugs waiting to happen, and are the low-hanging fruit of this debate. Too many language take the approach of "if we can parse it, it's fine", when really the aim should be to make it clear not just to a parser, but to the person reading/writing the code too. Hopefully more languages are more opinionated about that kind of thing in the future.

[rstuart4133]

> I think Opinionated can be good.

It can be. In fact it's almost essential if you are handing out knives to children; you want someone doing who is very opinionated about the dangers posed by sharp knives.

There was a recent HN post making the same point about JWT's. JWT's allow the null cipher, and in the hands of people who might not appreciate the disaster caused production code accepting JWT's using the null cipher you want a _very_ opinionated implementation that prevents it.

But for me, such an implementation would be a total pain in the arse. The null cipher is there to make debugging easier - getting things working for the first time can be very difficult without it. You can stick your opinions on whether I should be using it where the sun don't shine.