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Comment by coldtea

>There are a few people who frequently have this complaint, but I don't think it's a real problem. If you actually need to do Y in a situation where most people who think they need to do Y are wrong, it's not everyone else's responsibility to divine that you are the magical case.

Well, that's strange, because what they do is still divining. They try to divine "what you actually wanted", even though you asked another thing.

Even worse, a lot of the time the one doing the asking has explicitly said "I know this is unorthodox" or "just answer how to do Y please, don't give me your 'better' options".

It's especially annoying when what you what to do is hack something (and not do it the official way), bypass some restriction that absolutely prevents X, try an alternative style, push the envelope, or generally think Y is better even though the "conventional" sheep-like answer is "do X".

An example of the latter would be trying to use Java with simple POJOs and lite patterns in ~2005, and everybody suggesting you go through some monstrous J2EE setup with half the GoF book thrown in instead because that's "idiomatic".

Or e.g. trying to ask about trying to use a regex to quickly parse some known-quantity HTML where regex will work just fine (say, extract all href out of all a elements), and everybody insisting they lecture you on proper html parsing instead, not caring about your use case.

parent coldtea 5 years ago

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