That's a great metaphor for language smells! Some more anecdotes:
- Python shepherds you into using list comprehensions, even when it's almost always premature optimization and much harder to read than a loop. As a language smell that's not bad, it's just the worst I could think of in a post-v2 world. Luckily there's `black`, `flake8`, `isort` and `mypy`.
- Bash shepherds you into using `ls` and backticks, useless `cat`s, treating all text as ASCII, and premature portability in the form of "POSIX-ish". Luckily `shellcheck` takes care of several common issues.
- Lisp shepherds you into building your own language.
There's also tool shepherding:
- IDEA shepherds you into refactoring all the time, since it's the only IDE which does this anywhere near reliably enough. (At least in Java. In other languages renaming something with a common name is almost guaranteed to also rename unrelated stuff.)
- Firefox shepherds you into using privacy extensions.
- Chrome shepherds you into using Google extensions.
- Android shepherds you into installing shedloads of apps you hardly ever use.
- *nixes other than Mac OS shepherd you into using the shell and distrusting software by default.
- Windows and Mac OS shepherd you into using GUIs for everything and trusting software by default.
- Python shepherds you into using list comprehensions, even when it's almost always premature optimization and much harder to read than a loop. As a language smell that's not bad, it's just the worst I could think of in a post-v2 world. Luckily there's `black`, `flake8`, `isort` and `mypy`.
- Bash shepherds you into using `ls` and backticks, useless `cat`s, treating all text as ASCII, and premature portability in the form of "POSIX-ish". Luckily `shellcheck` takes care of several common issues.
- Lisp shepherds you into building your own language.
There's also tool shepherding:
- IDEA shepherds you into refactoring all the time, since it's the only IDE which does this anywhere near reliably enough. (At least in Java. In other languages renaming something with a common name is almost guaranteed to also rename unrelated stuff.)
- Firefox shepherds you into using privacy extensions.
- Chrome shepherds you into using Google extensions.
- Android shepherds you into installing shedloads of apps you hardly ever use.
- *nixes other than Mac OS shepherd you into using the shell and distrusting software by default.
- Windows and Mac OS shepherd you into using GUIs for everything and trusting software by default.