http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=558837


in reply to Re: RFC: Perl-Critic policy: ProhibitInlineSystemArgs
in thread RFC: Perl-Critic policy: ProhibitInlineSystemArgs

The real problem here is that it is very easy to create new laws, it is just very hard to create good ones, and almost impossible to repeal bad ones.

Things like PerlCritic and PBP have a habit of becoming defacto-standards, and like voting for political parties, you either vote for or against. You cannot vote for tax breaks and against cuts in health care, you gotta take the package. And for every good suggestion or two or three they contain, there also lurks a bad one. Or one that should only be applied under specific circumstances, or one that should only be applied until the programmer can justify not applying it on the basis of his/her knowledge of the underlying reasoning; or the nature of their code; or the naturee of the usage of their code--but defacto-standards do not get mandated by programmers with such knowledge.

Defacto-standards get applied as blanket requirements by PHBs, weak coders who want someone else to make their decisions and obsessive-compulsive paranoid pedants that once bitten through lack of knowledge or care, become twice shy about using their own faculties.


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