Ask HN: What "developer holy war" have you flip-flopped on?

Keyboard typing speed and compile times aren't really the bottle neck for the overwhelming majority of software engineers. For them these times are dwarfed by the time it takes Service Now access tickets to get fulfilled.

Oh, the typical ones, like all this type checking is stifling and slowing me down.

Strong std lib, good out of the box dev ux, great performance. It really is good for just hackin

It varies so much by language. In C, Go, C++, etc. I'm inclining, these days, towards tabs. You can always adjust the tab width for display, but you generally end up with a clear block structure since they're statement and block-oriented languages (syntactically):

  func foo(...) ... {
      if bar > 10 {
          if baz < 100 {
              ...
          }
      }
  }

But then I go back to Lisp and would absolutely hate it, without a formatter to help, because for readability you sometimes want the equivalent of the above but other times not:

  (defun greet (name)
    (format t "Hello ~S~%" name))

Two spaces, could be a tab and a small width, but you also see this a lot (imagine a, b, and c being long enough to justify the line breaks):

  (+ a
     (truncate b
               c))

You want a variable amount of whitespace on each of these lines for alignment. Tabs won't do since you can't guarantee the tab width. Once you've chosen to use spaces for some lines, you're forced to do it for the rest or you mandate that tab widths are specifically equivalent to N spaces, which defeats the purpose of using them in the first place.

So it ultimately comes down to the language and what makes it more or less readable.

>Why dynamic over static?

I started my coding career in C++. I know static well enough for my lifetime. It makes sense that if you're in the 1980s and choose static as the designer of the language.

But now the choice is available, why would you want to declare the variable. In my code I want to write "bob =" and the language figures that all out. If I feed a string into it or a number, why does it matter?

It saves me oodles of time not having to be concerned at all about that.

It's also very interesting in functions. Yes, I have been using the typing in python. def process_bob(self, bob: int) -> bool:

Technically i can shove whatever i want into that arg of bob. Imagine the function was a network protocol. v 1.1 did X, v1.2 did X and Y. That int becomes perhaps a list and that's totally fine. Very reusable, because iterating, process_bob can just become if bob == int: elif bob == list.

Why would I want my programming language to make things harder on myself for literally no gain?

Speaking for myself I'm static or death, BUT I can see how one might come away scarred from C++ and conflate static with the wild degree of ceremony and clunky tooling.

Nowadays the better static languages do a lot of type infererence so that a lot of that ceremony is pushed aside.

I recently did some semi-serious python work and I see some of the appeal; I definitely missed mandatory type declarations at the function argument level but barely if at all within functions.

There's a great Steve Yegge post about this topic of static/dynamic alliegence (via someone's gist because Google can't run a service long term for love or money): https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150

My rationale given on another comment is when writing web apps, everything comes in as text so you have to parse/convert and validate parameters anyhow.

Dynamic makes a lot of sense for web programming. Static should definitely be used in high risk software where its life and death, medical devices, rockets, nuclear plants, etc.

for me it helps especially with comparisons. Some operators are also better looking than their non ligature equivalents.

Basically, yes.