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Explain? To my mind, the article explains a problem, that two opposing views can both be technically correct, but one view is often useful and second, disagreeing opinion, is just contrary.

Your comment seems to fall into the second category: just contrary disagreement.



Explain? To my mind, the article explains a problem...

The article seems to explain a problem, but what it's really doing is expressing some opinions, misrepresenting opposed opinions as strawmen and going meta to further attack them.

The criticism of the contrary opinions is not wrong, it's technically correct, just misses completely the point since it doesn't respond to the strongest version of the objections, just to the weakest ones.


These are not straw man arguments. I have actually dealt with all three of these examples in my career. The python one is particularly relevant to me, but I’ve had push back on running our API over HTTPS “because if they want to hack you they will anyway so why pay the extra cost”.


Not three, four. No idea about Python text, I don't know what the https fuss is about either. But the other two things are not how I've seen them discussed, and I've seen them many times.

I'm in favor of GCs and guards. What I'm against is that some languages removed the option to manage memory manually when it makes sense and disabling guards once the code is debugged. Those were the terms and, in that context, the objections make sense: there are cases when it's important to know in advance that the GC'd won't get in the way.

Java was the start of all that crap, with all sort of restrictions: every function must be a method, you can't precompile, no pointers, everything GC'd...


Not the OP, but I agree with them: the appropriate response to

> Processing text files with Python is really nice and simple.

is not something silly about C, it is "It is, but the packaging system is an effing nightmare, have you tried Ruby?"


I will almost always get a least one developer making exactly the argument in the example whenever I suggest Python, so their point stands. When I proposed Django, getting a Rails counter proposal doesn't fall into the "100% correct but misses the point entirely", it is entirely on the nose.

So your counterpoint is ironically similar to the articles point.




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