Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by blowski 697 days ago
This is true of all famous essays. People remove the nuance included in the body and over-apply the title without really understanding it.

For example "Goto considered harmful". I remember working with a very good programmer who'd used a "goto", and a much less senior one[1] rejected their PR by linking to the article.

[1] I'm ashamed to say it was me, a long time ago.

1 comments

That's precisely why I love to only comment things with questions, i.e. "isn't go-to considered harmful? Is this really the best way?".

It gives the person making the change the opportunity to give context for their decision - and either change or spell out their reasoning for it, potentially giving me an opportunity to learn from them.

Another good benefit is that it doesn't "attack" the PR author in the "non-violent communication" way

Doesn't that seem a bit passive aggressive? See what I did there?
Surely it depends on both your phrasing and how you usually interact with your colleagues, no?
You can totally do this with non-passive-aggressive phrasings ("Is this possible using structured programming instead of GOTO? What went wrong when you tried, how messy does it get?")