> Someone has made a bunch of decisions for you that down the road you have no idea whether or not it will actually be good for you
Opinionated also means that these decisions will be the same in other places/projects I may join. In the medium and long term, that advantage may easily offset the value of custom decisions.
Re:I learnt C++ in 2018 and have no regrets
by mikepurvis on Monday January 07, 2019 @01:42PM
(#18848481)
Some subset of those decision are also things which just don't matter, like which side of the road to drive onβ the value is in a critical mass of people all doing the same thing more than it is in the merits of either approach.
A lot of stylistic stuff like filesystem layout falls into this bucket.
Bless standard formatters (gofmt, etc) becoming the norm.
Re:I learnt C++ in 2018 and have no regrets
by mikepurvis on Monday January 07, 2019 @03:40PM
(#18849815)
Appreciating this lays out the boundaries for the the more borderline stuff. An example of this, IMO, is things like unit testing and mocking frameworks. Most are pretty similar, and offer similar functionality, but perhaps with slight differences in capability or approach to solving common corner cases.
You might have some highly-specific need which demands a particular tool, but it's likely that you're best accepting whatever is most popular in your chosen ecosystem (gtest for C++, nose/tox for Python, etc).
A framework that gives you all the choices that you have without it will suffer the inner-platform effect and end up becoming just as complicated to use as the thing it was supposed to help you with. The whole point of a framework is to make certain decisions for you, to make certain paths easier by closing off other possibilities. If you don't trust the framework to make good choices for you, you're better off not using it.
Re:I learnt C++ in 2018 and have no regrets
by anuragsoni on Monday January 07, 2019 @11:06AM
(#18846293)
I'm curious, what would you consider base tooling in the context of a package manager/build tool? I don't think i made it clear enough with my comment, but I was thinking of tooling akin to Rust's cargo, OCaml's `dune + opam`, etc
What people call "opinionated" is nothing more than something being "architected". Someone has made a bunch of decisions for you that down the road you have no idea whether or not it will actually be good for you.
Using these types of frameworks short-circuits the process of being able to understand the nuances of building software. It's the apartment building or high rise of software development.
It turns design of your system from a personal journey toward the solution of your problem into little more than assembling linking logs.
I can understand the argument for an opinionated toolbox, but not for wanting base tooling itself to be opinionated.