[Tade0]

I get where the author is coming from, but at the same time, having spent most of my career to date as a front-end developer, I can tell you many stories of how hilariously off the rails this approach can go.

With a decade under my belt I'm feeling that I recently finally started learning and the conclusion so far is that half of the effectiveness of software engineering comes from obeying ultimately simple and common sense rules that anyone can follow, like "use idiomatic expressions", "read the documentation", "prefer pure functions and immutable data structures".

I'm an average(and kind of lazy) developer, but I found early on that I have an edge over more talented and hard-working people - I gather knowledge instead of compensating for the lack of it with hard work.

Can you frame it as elitism? I hope not, because I deeply believe the worst and laziest developers can use some of those rules so that they're both effective and still bad and lazy.

[nerdponx]

> prefer pure functions and immutable data structures

This sounds like common sense until it becomes common nonsense, because you use Python or Javascript or Ruby or whatever language where you don't have an optimizing compiler and optimized immutable data structures, so what could have been be a single-pass low-memory scan over a big dataset in 10 minutes that could run on a toaster is implemented as an inefficient clusterfuck that takes 12 hours and 4 GB of memory.

It's absolutely important to treat mutability as either a side effect or a local optimization from a design perspective. But Python is not Clojure no matter how hard you try, and at some point you're going to want to mutate a dictionary.

Anyway, the point is that what might seem like "common sense" in some situations is not always obvious or unambiguous in general.

[hef19898]

+1 for read the documentation.