[willcipriano]

Anyone else cringe at the use of "best practices" like this?

I can tell you why I do. I first encountered the term 15 years ago or so when studying the medical literature on HIV/AIDS. At the time (might still be this way) the most effective treatment was the now famous "drug cocktail", by applying multiple drugs that were individually only moderately effective we found that HIV/AIDS patients could live a somewhat normal life. In fact the treatment worked so well that after a decade of treatment some people live the rest of their lives without any detectable viral load at all, they are in effect cured of the disease and no longer needed treatment. This is the best practice, as it results in the best outcomes statistically speaking. The life expectancy of HIV/AIDS patients went from a few short months after infection to on par with the general population. This was provable, and not really a matter of serious debate as the evidence is overwhelming.

The formatting of a line of code one way or another feels completely different than that. It feels like somebody with a blog prefers it that way. It really should be called "best preferences" or something.

[ch4s3]

I agree that "best practices" probably isn't the best name for what community linters are and do, but "loose consensus among some OSS contributors is that these are agreeable convention" is a bit wordy. I don't think people generally take it literally.

[ljm]

Not for the same reason as you, but to me 'best practice' means that you can't do any better. In this context, it's saying that if you do it any other way that this specific way, it's objectively worse.

I prefer 'good practices' or 'guidelines' but as far as something like Rubocop is concerned, I don't really agree that its default setup meets that standard. Without some careful tweaking of the configuration you're likely to end up with a codebase full of premature abstractions that exist for literally no other reason except to satisfy Rubocop.

There is a subset of Rubocop rules that does a much better job, in terms of identifying potential sources of bugs (e.g. calling non-TZ aware date objects) and replacing deprecated methods with their alternatives where possible. The tool is worth it for that, so long as you disable all the nonsense about method lengths, class lengths, number of methods in a class, etc.

[bitwize]

"Best practice" in software, near as I can tell, means "what you will not get fired for doing". It means adhering to rules that the community has adopted, irrespective of whether those rules are a good idea even in the general case, let alone a specific instance where it might be better to contravene conventional wisdom.

[willcipriano]

> calling non-TZ aware date objects

That's a great example. What if I'm working in a embedded system with limited memory and I need to shave off a few kilobytes? What if time zones don't matter for my implementation, say I make a timer app and the only thing that matters is the delta between two times?

There are things that I think rise close to the level of best practices. For example your password hash comparison function should probably run in constant time, but a linter is never going to pick up on something like that.