You know the adage - beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
Some people swear by NetBeans and some by IntelliJ IDEA, some by Python and some by PHP.
In some shops you could lose your job if you insist on doing this:
public void hello()
{
if (....)
{
....
}
}
The question is all about visibility and maintainability.
I am addicted to using boolean algebra to reduce and simplify logic and use of state machines. However, there were past colleagues who believed my employ of "mathematical techniques" in coding is unsuitable, because it would not be visible and maintainable. And that would be a bad practice. Sorry people, the techniques I employ is very visible and maintainable to me - because when I return to the code six months later, I would understand the code clearly rather seeing a mess of proverbial spaghetti.
Hey buddy (like a former client used to say) do what you want as long as you know how to fix it when I need you to fix it.
I remember 20 years ago, a colleague of mine was fired for employing what today would be called agile development strategy. He had a meticulous incremental plan. But his manager was yelling at him "You can't incrementally release features to users! You must stick with the waterfall." His response to the manager was that incremental development would be more precise to customer's needs. He believed in developing for the customers needs, but the manager believed in coding to "customer's requirement".
We are frequently guilty for breaking data normalization, MVP and MVC boundaries. We inline instead of constructing a function. We take shortcuts.
Personally, I believe that PHP is bad practice, but what do I know. All the theoretical arguments boils down to trying fulfill one set of rules
quality = precision, maintainability
and profitability.
All other rules fade into the background. And of course this rule never fades:
Laziness is the virtue of a good
programmer.
