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> Above all else, be consistent.

Aren't you still doing the same thing though? You have your arbitrary rules and they're absolutely truths... until you change your mind about them. Except before the rule was "only space no tabs" and now it's "be consistent"?




Given how many people here are disagreeing except on "be consistent", I feel I'm in good company in having that as my rule. I'm not being inconsistent, I'm learning, growing and adapting. "Strong opinions, weakly held."

But yes, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." The question is, what is "foolish"? I'm arguing against things like `strpos` and `str_rot13`. I'm arguing against having similar functions where argument order is inconsistent. These are the sorts of things that slow developers down and force them to check the documentation every time just to make sure they aren't introducing bugs by default.


> I feel I'm in good company in having that as my rule

I'm sure you also felt in good company about tabs or not tabs or whatever it was you liked.


Kindly cite a problem with admitting mistakes and growing and learning from them.

Then explain how consistency is a bad thing.


> Kindly cite a problem with admitting mistakes and growing and learning from them.

Nothing against this.

> Then explain how consistency is a bad thing.

This is a really boring conversation, because if I give a good example you'll just define consistency for that example not to apply. For example, picking the token case of naming functions in such and such way, it occurs to me that I don't really care if you break rules are long it's done in a way that doesn't affect the interface. If something can be considered an implementation detail, I don't care that it doesn't follow the same rules, as long as the interface doesn't allow you to see it. But then you'll just say something like "oh but 'consistency' doesn't mean a rule applies under any and all circumstances, there's always caveats" bla bla bla.

It's a boring conversation, my point is that you had a dogma, and now you have a different dogma. You think you're evolving, I think you're changing but not evolving in a bigger way.




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