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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is so, so, so much more boring than NoSQL. I agree that Riak vs. Mongo has gotten pretty boring. But this is semicolons. For f's sake.

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I dunno... semi-colons have practical implications for everyone, but "my use case requires speed and persistence isn't an issue, therefore mongo is better" vs "i need persistence and didn't read the docs, who cares if it's a little slower - riak is better" gets pretty tiresome, particularly when my use case is "i need easy graph traversal, neo4j w/ gremlin is the wave of the future". :P

hahaha - I feel the best use of this thread is that we agree to spawn a series of blog posts debating the most boring debates to hit HN ever. Including sock-puppets to randomly drop surprise left turns like "no you are all wrong, here is why the ocaml vs haskell debate bores me" and "no, the real boredom is the long comment threads in the ongoing 'anarco-socialist' vs 'enlightened-libertarian' viewpoint wars"

Of course it's more boring than NoSQL debates, but it's also potentially so much more important. The reason people care is because you have two great projects which they might want to use for many reasons, but which are fundamentally incompatible because of a semicolon. It's not the philosophical divides between database technology where you have many subtleties to analyze and choose between, instead it's just a fucking semicolon forcing you take sides between two orthogonal projects which you might have good reason to use jointly.

It could be so much worse. At least they're not going on about camelCase and Hungarian notation.

Disagree. This is so much worse than that. At least with Hungarian notation (which thankfully died a well-deserved death), its advocates were arguing for a relatively well thought-out system of readability and tying member names to their types for quickly-identifiable scope and type referencing.

But, to suggest that simply removing semicolons constitutes some grand gesture towards readability, simplicity, or something as grandiose as a "minimalist aesthetic," is...beyond absurd.

It is Bike Shedding Qua Bike Shedding.

But you're... you're doing it. Look at yourself. You have a strong opinion about using semicolons.

Oh Good God, it's true.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

http://ow.ly/ajyBJ

You seem to be pretty interested in being as bored as possible with this discussion.......

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