Ask HN: What "developer holy war" have you flip-flopped on?

11 points by meowface ↗ HN
Vim vs. Emacs, tabs vs. spaces, Mac vs. Linux, static vs. dynamic typing, JSON vs. YAML... what big divide have you switched sides on?

16 comments

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Font ligatures. Used to hate them with a burning passion. Now they're table stakes for trying different fonts.
Weak/Dynamic vs. Strong/Static typing.

I used to complain about the latter then I grew up.

I am a convert as well. I wouldn’t say that I gave or grew up but that I was arguing from ignorance. On a group project someone proposed trying TypeScript and I jumped in and completely fell in love.

My only arguments against were slower development due to an imposed build/compile step and that error reports would not reflect the source code.

Scala is not that bad. It’s still bad and overkill for most people and most projects, but not that bad for some
>Vim vs. Emacs,

Nano has always won. Yes, vim is everywhere. I dont fathom why emacs exists.

>tabs vs. spaces

tabs make much more sense. python should fix this mistake. I guess my IDE fixes it for me?

>Mac vs. Linux,

100% linux; i tend to stick to the debian field, but certainly never actual debian. I really need to try alma; but dnf/yum/rpm and what the hell happened to centos? fedora is a mess like it always was. KDE? really we havent found one of the dozens of better DE?

>static vs. dynamic typing

Dynamic, ill never ever switch to a language that's static. I started in C++, never ever going back.

>JSON vs. YAML

JSON all the way.

>tabs make much more sense. python should fix this mistake. I guess my IDE fixes it for me?

I think tabs make sense when you're by yourself and spaces make sense when you're working with others.

I used to be a vim snob and thought everyone should use what I use. I am now an Emacs lover and believe everyone should use what works for them. I grew up!
I was Emacs, got tired of some stupid things, Vim or other things now. Every other thing has some Vim mode thingy anyway... (Which I always used, regardless.)

Same stupid reasons make me pretty much drop Linux. I have it on Steam Deck, but that's all. MacBook, and Haiku for cool stuff. (Or for worky stuff, because I hate MacOS.)

Fixing tech debt is rarely worth the effort.
Rust v Go.

I was firmly in the Rust only camp, specifically in the business environment. I’m still strongly biased towards it, but I appreciate the nuance and needs for some teams and needs.

Writing this prompted me to check my https://cdaringe.github.io/programming-language-selector/, and it’s clear go’s dev ux scores are relatively underrated

Same but from a C vs Go perspective. Didn't like GC or bundling dependencies into the final binary. But at the end of the day it's still small compared to most other languages deployment artifacts. Despite being a GC language, GO still puts you in the driver seat for how memory is allocated (ie avoid GC in the first place). And goroutines are really nice to use, without introducing colored functions like most other languages do. To top it all off Go keeps the C tradition that error handling should be a first class part of the algorithm, not something hidden off to the side.

So I'm reaching for Go for pretty much everything now days.

I no longer care about tabs vs. spaces, just that each further indentation follows the Fibonacci sequence.
- Vim vs Emacs

- Mac HW vs Linux OS (I really want a combo else give me Snow Leopard)

- Staying put vs Leaving/Sabbatical (AI nonsense is boring/burning me out)

Open vs closed source software

Open vs closed web

Both of the open options are nice on paper, until you realize that they were largely being pushed by big tech. The same big tech that is scraping them hard for AI training, and possibly have been using them silently without respecting licensing agreements for an even longer period of time.

"Open" only works when everyone plays nice and fair. This whole kerfuffle of AI scraping has shown that this isn't happening, and likely hasn't happened for a long time if at all.