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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I disliked the most about software development was when somebody wrote an article like this, and then somebody on my team would be like "see? you can't use flags, it's a code smell. There's an article about it, and it got on Hackernews and everything. We don't want our code to smell. Flags considered harmful. Will not approve any PRs with flags!"

Article Driven Development. People are allowed to have their opinions, but sheesh. Just say "here is a problem you can run into with flags, better be careful!"

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There was someone on my last team who loved using this term in pointless nitpicking critiques. We were a prototyping team. One minute he’d wax philosophical about how prototyping should be done simple and fast, using throwaway code and cobbling together any preexisting bits we can find to move fast, and the next he’d claim that the name “NetworkManager” for the net code client component was “code smell”. Very eye roll inducing.

The worlds full of hypocritical morons. There was a guy on my team who would promote random blog post driven ideas, but never implement the codebase. So the codebase he led was a dumpster fire, but he had enough clout that our director turned a blind eye. It would have been laughable, until our applications merged and we all had to play in the same trash pile. Everyone worth their salt left the company, so mission accomplished I guess.

At least that's a sign that people on the team want to improve the code, even if they're outsourcing their thinking to article authors. I'd rather work with people who do that than people who don't want to improve their code at all. Using that as the starting point for a discussion is a useful process.

Agree here. Programming is a social discipline that should encourage discussions, rather than the enforcement of dogmas. I once worked in a team where the goal for a PR was to have as little lines changed as possible - never again.

People realized "considered harmful" was too hyperbolic, so they moved to "smell". But then it gets treated the same way, because who wants to be smelly?

“‘Code smells’ Considered Harmful”

Somewhere I saw a "considered harmful, considered harmful" article. Full meta.

Unfortunately there’s article driven product management, article driven executive leadership, and probably the same thing can be found nearly anywhere someone is in over their head.

Yep, people who evangelize blog posts have ruined many a codebase.

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