This is a brilliant move by Yegge. Now if you call him wrong, you're just like the guy who attacks Aunt Marge's politics at the family dinner.
Unfortunately, your business is not Aunt Marge. You need to be able to make the tough calls and say that, no, banning the color yellow is not a viable policy. Software engineering and programming languages are both seriously-studied disciplines, and all too often, the evidence comes down conclusively in favor of one position.
To pick an easy target, in many languages like Java and C++, null can be passed in place of (almost) any type. But
1) Empirical studies show that values intended to be non-nullable are more common...
2) ...which means that many method definitions are cluttered with is-null checks (to cut down the exponentially-increased state space)...
3) ...and it's just as easy to provide a feature to turn it on when it's wanted (option types/Maybe monad)...
4) ...which many companies hack into C++/Java anyway (various annotations and preprocessors)
This is a pretty solid case. Liberals win -- it's less code. Conservatives win -- there are fewer bugs. Sometimes things really are that one-sided.
Unfortunately, your business is not Aunt Marge. You need to be able to make the tough calls and say that, no, banning the color yellow is not a viable policy. Software engineering and programming languages are both seriously-studied disciplines, and all too often, the evidence comes down conclusively in favor of one position.
To pick an easy target, in many languages like Java and C++, null can be passed in place of (almost) any type. But
1) Empirical studies show that values intended to be non-nullable are more common...
2) ...which means that many method definitions are cluttered with is-null checks (to cut down the exponentially-increased state space)...
3) ...and it's just as easy to provide a feature to turn it on when it's wanted (option types/Maybe monad)...
4) ...which many companies hack into C++/Java anyway (various annotations and preprocessors)
This is a pretty solid case. Liberals win -- it's less code. Conservatives win -- there are fewer bugs. Sometimes things really are that one-sided.