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From: Andrew DeFaria <Andrew AT DeFaria DOT com>
Subject: Re: Command line arguments
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2012 07:32:21 -0700
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On 11/02/2012 05:36 AM, Earnie Boyd wrote:
> YMMV when it comes time for maintenance by someone other than the code creator.  Consistency helps reduce cost and reducing company cost helps increase my pay check.
I disagree. A [emphasis on] *foolish* consistency doesn't do anything to 
reduce cost. It's something programmers believe helps, then they spend a 
lot of time making things consistent for consistency's sake based upon 
this myth and thus adds cost not reduces it. Sprinkling syntactic sugar 
obscures the clarity of things, again, IMHO.

Don't get me wrong - some forms of consistency are good and do help 
reduce cost because readability increases. But syntactic sugar is there 
for the computer - not the human.

As for paycheck, I can assure you that mine is at an all time high and 
way above the average (like 3x).
> Taking a few seconds to use {} to delimit all variables is priceless in the world of maintenance.
No, IMHO it's wasteful to spend time doing this non-productive activity 
when it's the rare case that it is truly needed.
> As a native English (American) speaker, I find myself more than once expanding contractions to make myself more clear about what I want to convey.
And it probably ain't any clearer to anybody. If consistency in language 
was that much of a concern and you really wanted to make it such that 
you are absolutely clear then you should drop English ( 
http://defaria.com/Jokes/Plan4ImprovementOfEnglishSpelling.php and 
http://defaria.com/Jokes/CrazyLanguage.php) and pick up Lojban ( 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban). Of course then you'd be talking to 
yourself pretty much.
> Contractions for contraction sake is not always a good thing.
Nobody said it was. This was an *example* - intended to convey a higher 
and deeper meaning. Think about it instead of simply taking it literally.

And with that I think we should end this, pretty much off topic 
discussion (take it to email if you'd like).
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
One time a cop pulled me over for running a stop sign. He said "Didn't 
you see the stop sign." I said "Yeah, but I don't believe everything I 
read."


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