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by Calamitous 907 days ago
In business, I have four "bad words": just, only, simply, and obviously.

Used in a work context, they are nearly always used in an attempt to diminish the perceived effort of something, so I get very sketched out when anyone (even/especially other programmers) starts throwing them around.

3 comments

Hmm when I think about it, the only two in that list I’ve used are just and only. Whenever I see myself writing them in my response, I spend the 5-10 min to throw together the PR to do it. It’ll lack testing but I deploy it to a QA server and let the asker go wild with seeing if the solution matches. If I can’t do that, I realize there’s something else there and rewrite my response. I find that to be a useful gauge on the appropriateness of those words.
I thought about this, trying to find exceptions, and you're completely right. Good list to put on my wall.
The only exception I could find is in the case of how I used it in this sentence.
> Used in a work context, they are nearly always used in an attempt to diminish the perceived effort of something

Similarly, when I hear people say "nearly always" to justify a position I get very sketched out and think they're either not listening or are inexperienced and irrationally afraid of what I'm trying to tell them.