http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=938471


in reply to "Just use a hash": An overworked mantra?

Now that is a great meditation - davido++! Great content, and great proof that your conclusions are right!

In my eyes, your main point think before using your mantra is the thing that distinguishes an expert from a wannabe.

Few weeks ago I had a similar topic with a collegue who just joined the team. We sometimes have to lookup few values from one tool and put it in an excel-sheet. When being trained on this, his statement was "This needs to be automated. You need a tool for this.". A mantra which is probably right in 95% of the cases - but not in this case (extremely low effort for doing things by hand, data-structures of original data often change, highly-bureocratic IT limiting non-gui-access to the tool ...). Unfortunately, trying to persuade that guy that his mantra isn't always right took more time than doing the manual lookups/copies in a several months period ...

Unfortunately, sometimes you can't get the mantra out of some peoples head :-(

Rata