Comment by sunrunner
9 months ago
> a world of social proof
Which results in the idea of 'good practice', 'best practice' and 'bad practice', and nobody wants to be seen as the person doing things that are considered bad practice, because that would imply that you're a bad developer.
And I almost always hesitate to use the term 'engineer' because as far as I know engineering is considered to be a practice/process that uses measurements and results to drive decision-making, unlike various areas in software. Can you imagine if the same kind of thinking was applied in civil engineering? "This new material has a lot of stars on GitHub and everyone is saying the old materials are bad practice."*
* Which is a thing of course (see: Asbestos) but only in the places with measurable observable outputs.
I'd say Asbestos is more comparable to a project or technology having too many CVEs, which goes well with the US government asking people to stop using C and C++.
The problem I'd say is the reactions from our community to such pleas. My degree and original profession is Electrical Engineering, and Engineers not as personally attached to the tech as software developers are, nor they conduct themselves like this.