"It worked different three months ago...". But I agree that this is no reason to gave to wade through commented out sections[1] but to simply use the powers of <vcs-of-choice> diff.
I definitely recognize these patterns from non-startups. Ingredients: demanding customers, company led by former developers who still avoid all non-coding related improvements as enterprisy. Often it is simply the Peter Principle at work, duct-tape programming led you here, but not further.
Another important thing he points at is to not write you own incarnation of every library you find lacking but provide patches/support/whatever to existing ones. While it might help your CV to have just another template library (which will inevitably be lacking again) on github, the ecosystem profits more from a few well defined and long-term maintained choices.
I would want to turn the question around and (genuinely, not rhetorically) ask: which ecosystems right now do have a good security baseline? Am I wrong when I guess Java/.Net/Ruby and possibly more recent PHP frameworks?
In this case you are probably right. The solution with separate configuration shines though, when you have many values to configure (notwithstanding keyword args). But, and that is my main takeaway, TDD does apparently (and not surprisingly) not show the way to one or the other solution. On the contrary: the solution was already given in advance and the TDD part was more or less toying around with the moving parts of the solution.
So you see how difficult it is to please armchair psychologists: leaving out the first person pronoun from sentences is also considered bad style by some (with the suggested pseudo objectivity). Others conclude even that the person has no self esteem etc etc.
A resume is about the person presenting him/herself, isn't it?
I am probably not smart, maybe not intellectual but most definitely not a lady.
As for the industry: seemingly the industry thinks that showing ass and tits on a booth is worth it. That alone says enough. It is not about the ones who are earning their money there but the ones who think that their industry needs that. No discussion of "choice" needed.
I think it's the chinese whisper effect applied to http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html [0] and as such more cult than information. As witnessed by the discussion around here.
[0] ("Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.")
Indeed. That fluff article reminds me of the .NET spam around 2005. Pointing out three times that "the best developers...like to use new technologies": so, they leave you with a pile of smelling javascript over two years when they are heading for <fill in>. Are they the best by the way? or does it feel like being the best when you can finally add two numbers in a new language? Oh, and that "developer hapiness" argument again. Then: "composed from modules, piped together" contrasted with "traditional monolithic applications". So the writer (or the node developers he represents) was/were unable writing composable code in the other languages they know? (must be a lot, see above) Just wait until their piped modules look like this: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/image/brazil21.jpg
If your code turns into 30 one-liners with 30! unforeseen possible calling combinations thereby exposing an API of irrelevant auxiliary functions to the outside world? Yes.
Not from an outside view I would say. But when we are talking about the subjective perception of stress, it might as well be that the stress as perceived by the diver or the A&E consultant is not proportionally higher.
The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity". Discussing efforts to make the interface "safer to use", it noted that current "naïve" pornography detectors assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people's faces as pornography.
So, if you have to hide something, show your private parts. Can we conclude this?
Isn't it a much simpler explanation that healthcare should never be a free market as one of it's participants, the "patient" is not participating voluntarily?
(This is not a direct response to your post, but I place it here as you put a market argument upfront)
When I search for "Scala" the programming language in that interface, I still get the majority of the results from Italy, specifically the region of Milan (and the Teatro alla Scala). Might be, because "making a program" is an activity in music too, and google is unable to filter that?
Don't worry, (US) corporations will be able to sue (EU) states soon when they don't like their laws [1] . Line of argumentation: "Europe has an unreasonably high standard [in it's protective laws], and not one based on science" [2]
[1] Including if(0){} abominations