What unpopular opinions do you have about software development?
quora.com
quora.com
- Languages which "compile to javascript" are little more than linters with delusions of grandeur.
- Significant whitespace is still syntax. Replacing brackets with non-printable characters only offers the illusion of elegance, at the expense of legibility and explicitness.
- PHP and Javascript may be terrible as general purpose languages, but they're very good at their intended purpose.
- There is no moral dimension to software licensing. FOSS software is not fundamentally good, and proprietary software is not fundamentally evil.
- The web is actually much better now than it was in the 90s.
"If I was going to try machine learning I would code up from scratch rather than relying on black boxes."
Another one, a preference for Python (or Go, or Rust, or whatever it is next week) is due to its fashionability, rather than any intrinsic merit of the language.
See also this discussion:
I worked on a neural network product that was coded in C++. It worked, and it came out early, before deep learning got bigger than beatlemania.
It used intrinsics to incorporate SIMD instructions, thus it was tied to a particular processor version. I seemed to be the only person who noticed or cared if the derivatives were calculated correctly, or to implement constraints with Lagrange multipliers rather than wishful thinking. Once we got it working we would be crazy to change anything.
Thus tensorflow, keras, and similar tools can save you a lot of grief.
In other words, it was a black box.
If you violate every copyright law in the books, I still wouldn't care as long as your program does what I need to get done to get on with my work/life.