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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Is this like 'unless'?

Unless is great if it's the first or second clause on the line. If it's the tenth, then it feels more like slapstick and I am the butt of the joke. Haha, just kidding, we aren't really going to call that function.

Similarly, rightward:

   someBigFunction(thatNeedsAnswersFrom(), otherFunctions(), true) => variableIAmDebugging

Three unnamed Laws of Computing that everyone ignores and at their peril:

- Nobody reads your unit tests in a PR

- People glaze over at the end of long lines of code

- Merges are hard

#2 and #3 combine to cause over half of the bad merges I have had to diagnose. Don't save the important bits for the end of a line. If I were still writing Ruby code, I'd be prepping to see more of them.

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If your 10th clause is an unless then you're using it wrong. I agree that unless and the right hand assignment can be used incorrectly but that's not a reason to omit the feature :)

Where these conversations tend to break down is "you are using it wrong", which is technically correct but practically is a non sequitur.

I can't control other people. Neither can you. Unfortunately saying that and acting like it's true are two separate things, and so we are chronically making decisions based on an illusion of control that is unhealthy to the point of self-harm. It just sets you up for disappointment and/or antisocial behavior (eg delusions of grandeur)

We put safeties on missiles. We color code and cover emergency power cutoffs in server rooms. We've started putting finger preservation devices on table saws. But code? Well it's your fault for backing into the shutoff button.

"You're using it wrong" = "People will use it wrong." = "You're going to have to work with people who use it wrong" = "You are going to run out of places to hide their bodies and just have to accept it being used wrong."

The question isn't "can it be used right?". Every bad library ever written has been "used right" by at least the author, even if not all the time. The question is "can we live with how often it is going to be used wrong?"

There are no language features that can't "be used wrong". This argument proves too much!

Status Quo Bias is probably why we don't think of existing language features this way.

It's of course true that we're all likely to work with (or even be) incompetent people, but I really doubt individual language features has substantial impact on the damage they cause.

> We put safeties on missiles

And we put linters on code.

Sometimes. Often we don't. Putting linters on code is doing it right. But unless the language is opinionated and requires the linter there will be people who don't use it.

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