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Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

For whatever reason, the current zeitgeist is all about enforcing as many things as possible via tooling versus actually learning core principles.

I think this is because all of tech seems to be culturally downstream from FAANGs who have weird problems like "we have 500 devs making multiple commits a day and we can't trust them to do anything more than close tickets." Those are wholly self-inflicted problems, but the rest of the industry laps them up as if they are the secret to being as "great" as FAANGs. Couple that with tons of people who have less than <7 YOE in tech and/or are switching into it and you see there are very real political advantages to "keeping up with best practices."

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I don’t see how using tooling prevents you from learning core principles. As in, what _core_ principle am I missing on because I don’t manually indent my braces? Note that this conversation is about _style_.

The zeitgeist re style is very much “don’t fret too much about it, use an automated tool and move on”.

Compared to the flame wars of the past about tabs vs spaces and other inconsequential things we’ve come a long way, and for good.

It doesn’t. But my snark comes from the fact that we seem to talk even less than before about actual engineering and more about the tools of software.

It's your choice to talk about something else. Nobody put a gun to your head - I hope - and forced you to read this story and comment on it.

> talk even less than before about actual engineering and more about the tools

Isn't that just a consequence of how much--or little--context is shared with (or easily-communicable-to) Random Strangers On The Internet?

For example, I've got some architectural issues going on, but it's a lot of work just to summarize it in a way that doesn't require local/domain knowledge. In contrast, talking about the weather or tabs-vs-spaces doesn't need much set-up.

that's also engineering.

Enforcing mundane things with tooling is 100% orthogonal to core principles of programming.

I say this with 20+ years of programming experience: a project that doesn't do that is a project run by amateurs.

I suspect FAANGs got infected by these idea by hiring from more conservative institutions driven by their financial bottom-line. I've never worked at FAANGs but I've seen that arc at other companies as they scale. Practices that foster speed and innovation are supplanted by ones that favor predictability and safety.

> the current zeitgeist is all about enforcing as many things as possible via tooling versus actually learning core principles.

That argument doesn't make much sense IMHO. By enforcing as many things as possible using some tooling we now do have more time to actually learn "core principles" instead of figuring how to configure/use/... $IDE/$EDITOR/$TOOL/$COMPILER/$OS to get comparable results (or anything to build at all).

scale means making the problems faced by 20% of your community a problem for all of your community

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