Opening up the opinion box

Mat Ryer and Jerod Santo sit down to review and discuss the MOST and LEAST unpopular “unpopular opinions” since we started keeping track of such things. Also Generics.

Discuss on Changelog News

Join Changelog++ to support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear!

Sponsors

• Teleport – Teleport Access Plane lets you access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com
• LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.
• Equinix Metal - Proximity – Take your infrastructure further, faster. On March 3rd, join Equinix Metal for their first technical user conference called Proximity. It’s a “follow-the-sun” day of live-streamed technical demonstrations showcasing Equinix Metal’s partners and ecosystem. Visit metal.equinix.com/proximity

Featuring

• Grant Seltzer Richman – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Steve High – Twitter, GitHub
• Jon Sabados – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Jay Conrod – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Ian Lopshire – Twitter, GitHub
• Preslav Rachev – Twitter, GitHub
• Mark Bates – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Marcel van Lohuizen – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Carolyn Van Slyck – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Mislav Marohnić – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Kris Brandow – Twitter, GitHub
• Natalie Pistunovich – Twitter, GitHub
• Michael Knyszek – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Bill Kennedy – Twitter, GitHub, Website
• Ramiro Berrelleza – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Daniel Martí – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Brian Ketelsen – Twitter, GitHub
• Mat Ryer – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Twitter, GitHub

Notes and Links

MOST unpopular

1. Baseball is the most exciting sport in the world (Grant Steltzer on episode #159)
2. Using err as an error variable make code hard to read (Steve High on episode #179)
3. Chocolate is nasty (Jon Sabados on episode #174)
4. JS Party is better than Go Time (Jerod Santo (of course) on episode #154)
5. Copy/paste with formatting should be default (Jay Conrod on episode #187)

Runners up

• On episode #167 Ian Lopshire said he thinks futures have a place in Go
• On episode #183 Preslav Rachev said that Go needs more magic)
• On episode #171 Mark Bates confessed he doesn’t particularly like bacon

LEAST unpopular

1. Inheritance and complexity in configuration languages (Marcel van Lohuizen on episode #163)
2. Disadvantages can become advantages as the world changes (Kris Brandow on episode #157)
3. The Go community lacks great GraphQL clients (Mislav Marohnić on episode #153)
4. Bad feedback better than no feedback from new users (Carolyn Van Slyck on episode #184)
5. Successful devs are stubborn (83% pop) (Jerod Santo on episode #167)

Runners up

• On episode #173 Natalie Pistunovich said if you have a decently paying job and aren’t in a minority/diversity group… don’t apply for diversity scholarships
• On episode #167 Kris Brandow said we try to make software engineering look too easy
• On episode #165 Michael Knyszek said Go’s garbage collector doesn’t need to become generational

Generic Opinions

• Not having Generics is good for Go (Ramiro Berrelleza on episode #177)
• We don’t need Generics in Go (Brian Ketelsen on episode #170)
• Investing so much into Generics is a mistake (Daniel Marti on episode #155)

Other thinks mentioned

• Mat’s GraphQL client
• Mislav on Git being too hard

Episode source