Re:Static Linking Considered Harmful (2004)
by brundolf on Monday September 28, 2020 @12:01PM
(#24618087)
The "X Considered Harmful" trope has become exhausting ("harmful", even?).
Every single technical decision has trade-offs. You might make a case that you (usually) shouldn't do X in cases like Y, or maybe even that you (usually) shouldn't do X in general, but it's a very big statement to say that something is flatly harmful. Very, very few things are so simple. If you aren't Edsger Dijkstra, there's a good chance you're outing yourself as either inexperienced, or willfully ignorant, by claiming them to be so. Yet this meme has encouraged lots of people to do just that, by making dogmatism easy and catchy.
Every single technical decision has trade-offs. You might make a case that you (usually) shouldn't do X in cases like Y, or maybe even that you (usually) shouldn't do X in general, but it's a very big statement to say that something is flatly harmful. Very, very few things are so simple. If you aren't Edsger Dijkstra, there's a good chance you're outing yourself as either inexperienced, or willfully ignorant, by claiming them to be so. Yet this meme has encouraged lots of people to do just that, by making dogmatism easy and catchy.