[chousuke]

it's not that "best practices" or any of those things are what causes trouble; it's failing to recognize that they're just tools, and people will still be the ones doing the work. And people should never be treated as merely tools.

You can use all of those things as to enable people to do things better and with less friction, but you also need to keep in mind that if a tool becomes more of a hindrance than a help, you should go looking for a new one.

[diffxx]

> it's not that "best practices" or any of those things are what causes trouble; it's failing to recognize that they're just tools, and people will still be the ones doing the work. And people should never be treated as merely tools.

For me, the concept of best practices is pernicious because it is a delegation of authority to external consensus which inevitably will lead to people being treated as tools as they are forced to contort to said best practices. The moment something becomes best practice, it becomes dogma.

[potatoz2]

Imagine your doctor or pilot eschewing “best practices” and what your reaction would be. There’s a reason knowledge communities build consensus.

Best practice doesn’t mean you’re at the mercy of the consensus, it just means you have to justify why you should stray from it.

[danielheath]

Doctors “best practices” are handed down by the AMA (or local equivalent). Pilots “best practices” are handed down by the FAA (or local equivalent).

Programmers best practices are handed down by the twitter accounts of consultants. It’s not quite the same thing.

[diffxx]

This comment perfectly encapsulates the point that I am making about best practices: the concept is used as a cudgel to silence debate and to confer a sense of superiority on the practitioner of "best practice." It is almost always an appeal to authority.

No one wants cowboy pilots ignoring ground control. Doctors though do not exactly have the best historical track record.

Knowledge communities should indeed work towards consensus and constantly be trying to improve themselves. Consensus though is not always desirable. Often consensus goes in very, very dark directions. Even if there is some universal best practice for some particular problem, my belief is that codifying certain things as "best practice" and policing the use of alternative strategies is more likely to get in the way of actually getting closer to that platonic ideal.

[chasil]

Perhaps a better example might be "covering indexes," or what Oracle would call an "index full scan."

Is is an idea so efficient that to disregard it is inefficiency.

"I had never heard of, for example, a covering index. I was invited to fly to a conference, it was a PHP conference in Germany somewhere, because PHP had integrated SQLite into the project. They wanted me to talk there, so I went over and I was at the conference, but David Axmark was at that conference, as well. He’s one of the original MySQL people.

"David was giving a talk and he explained about how MySQL did covering indexes. I thought, “Wow, that’s a really clever idea.” A covering index is when you have an index and it has multiple columns in the index and you’re doing a query on just the first couple of columns in the index and the answer you want is in the remaining columns in the index. When that happens, the database engine can use just the index. It never has to refer to the original table, and that makes things go faster if it only has to look up one thing.

"Adam: It becomes like a key value store, but just on the index.

"Richard: Right, right, so, on the fly home, on a Delta Airlines flight, it was not a crowded flight. I had the whole row. I spread out. I opened my laptop and I implemented covering indexes for SQLite mid-Atlantic."

This is also related to Oracle's "skip scan" of indexes.

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

[Spooky23]

Most software “best practices” are a poorly structured replacement for a manual.

Aviation best practices were written from the outcome of minor and major disasters.

[fsckboy]

> And people should never be treated as merely tools.

maybe on a tight knit team people don't mind being treated like tools because they understand what needs to get done next, and see that it makes the most sense for them to do it, it's nothing personal.

At my freshman year "1st day" our university president gave us an inspirational speech in which he said "people say our program just trains machines... I want you do know we don't train machines. We educate them."

[chousuke]

I'd say that if you have a tight-knit team, you are already doing the very opposite of treating people as tools. There's nothing wrong with having a shared understanding of a goal and then assuming a specific role in the effort to accomplish that goal; people are very good at that.

The problem is when you think of people the same way you think of a hammer when you use it to hit nails: The hammer doesn't matter, only that the nail goes in.

[gonz0p0litik]

Best practices are subjective. What is best practice is for C is not the same as Python.

SQL DBs provide consistency guarantees around mutating linked lists. It’s not hard to do that in code and use any data storage format.

Imo software engineers have made software “too literal” and generated a bunch of “products” to pitch in meetings. This is all constraints on electron state given an application. A whole lot of books are sold about unit tests but I know from experience a whole lot of critical software systems have zero modern test coverage. A lot of myths about the necessity of this and that to software have been hyped to sell stock in software companies the last couple decades.

[chousuke]

"Best practices" are just a summary of what someone (or a group of someones) thinks is something that is broadly applicable, allowing you to skip much of the research required to figure out what options there are even available.

Of course, dogmatic adherence to any principle is a problem (including this one). Tools can be misused, but that doesn't really affect how useful they can be; though I think better tools are generally the kind that people will naturally use correctly, that's not a requirement.