Comment by nilirl
10 hours ago
The adjective 'useful' is doing a lot of the heavy-lifting here.
What kind of 'useful'? Normative? Empirical? Prescriptive? Pragmatic?
'Useful' is a very subjective north star.
10 hours ago
The adjective 'useful' is doing a lot of the heavy-lifting here.
What kind of 'useful'? Normative? Empirical? Prescriptive? Pragmatic?
'Useful' is a very subjective north star.
>What kind of 'useful'?
Someone says it's useful to them. If you get a consensus where >50% find it useful, then it's probably useful.
Ok, that's empirically useful by argument of popularity.
By that same measure: correctness, maintainability, and efficiency are not that useful.
I wasn't saying usefulness is not important, I'm saying this post conveniently crammed the hardest problem of writing software into a fuzzy adjective.