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Discussion on: My solution is the best!

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xowap profile image
Rémy 🤖

Well I agree on a lot of what you say. It makes no sense to define things by what they're not or to extensively make fun of other stacks/methods.

There is also an image that I like to give. We developers are pretty concerned with sorting algorithms. However, although there is some edge cases better covered by other algorithms, the quick sort is usually the algorithm that everybody ends up using. Yet if you implement it yourself you'll notice it's 3x slower than the stdlib's implementation. How so? If you look at the code you'll understand that it's a very large assembly of hybrid techniques which are here to cover the weak points of other techniques. In the end no single technique won, it's the combination of all of them that make them strong.

However, there is bad sorting algorithms that are not employed there in any way. Those are bad and should not be used. Nobody uses bogosort. Period.

Not everybody gets a medal for just showing up. Some things are just bad and we need to be able to point it out. Maybe not by spending hours making fun of it but at some point you need to be able to have an hybrid conversation where you don't just shut up and pretend to be nice.

All in all, all things should be balanced.

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jhotterbeekx profile image
John Hotterbeekx

Totally agree, there absolutely are things out there that are just plain bad. Still this can be approached with decent arguments instead of making fun of someone for choosing that solution.

I think you make a great point by talking about balance. As with a lot of things this is not a black or white case, there is a lot of gray in between. And like I say with my other posts, I hope people don't blindly follow the things they read, but use them in their own way in their own process.

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Patrick Tingen

For some things this holds true, especially for things that can be measured, like sorting algorithms. However, how are you going to compare frameworks or operating systems. My phone runs Windows Mobile. Is that better or worse than iOS or Android? And if so, by how much? Is Windows 10% better than iOS or 0.6kg worse than Android? And is Android 1.3 times as good as iOS? How are you going to compare it and what unit are you going to use?

There is no way to measure the quality for things like this. Windows works for me, the Apple ecosystem does not, but that is personal.

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Rémy 🤖

Like I said, maybe you can't pick the winner but you certainly can say who's not winning. By example Notepad is clearly outside the text editors war or PHP is beyond a doubt not advisable if you want to keep your mental sanity.

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jhotterbeekx profile image
John Hotterbeekx

And still, notepad could be good enough for what you are doing :)

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

I use notepad a shitload of times during the day. Guess for what I use it? To take small, temporary, notes.

It's a quick and small editor to paste some log excerpts, stack traces, primary key values, etc. which I need to have around for a while.

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Mihail Malo

When things aren't clear, you have to break them down into smaller components and compare those.
With iOS and Windows Mobile that may be full-stack parts like security, app management, or even the system settings availability/UX, but it might also be more abstract things like "performance" and "developer experience" where there are further subtleties and it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison.