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by only_as_i_fall 1716 days ago
Doesn't that kind of imply that everyone's opinions are equally valid? If 95% of your profession is on the same page with a certain practice then I'd argue it's really not reasonable to go against the grain without a very good reason.

I think "best practices" strikes a good balance between things that are personal preferences and things that are laws.
2 comments
floverfelt 1716 days ago
Yeah it does. Software is basically a mental model and different people have different mental models of the world so we make up languages/practices/etc. that fit those models.

The point of the examples I gave (and a lot of browsing HackerNews) seems to suggest that 95% of the profession is not on board with our most basic practices around unit testing, version control, etc.

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only_as_i_fall 1716 days ago
Maybe we just disagree about what constitutes best practices. I can't speak much about Java land, but I wouldn't describe rebasing in general as a best practice without further context. If you're working on a team that always rebases feature branches then your preference for not rebasing doesn't seem valid to me.
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anthonygd 1716 days ago
I'm not sure if there's anything 95% of developers are on the same page about.

From what I've seen, every company has a different idea of what _best practices_ are. Generally comes down to what some influential developer likes.

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mindcrime 1715 days ago
From what I've seen, every company has a different idea of what _best practices_ are.

And that's fine. "Best practices" don't necessarily need to be universal in scope. Read the Knowledge Management literature and you'll see plenty of discussion of the idea of scoping "best practices" to in terms of "site best practice", "company best practice", "industry best practice" and so on.

There's also a lot of discussion about using different language other than "best practice" exactly to acknowledge that "best practices" aren't always BEST practices, if you get what I mean. Calling them something like "recommended practices" or "proven practices" or similar lingo gives a way to denote things that are recommended at least locally, without having to claim that they are either universal in scope, or absolutely "best" in any sense.

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