Today, a phrase.
- best practices, n.
- 1. Something, somewhere is so horribly wrong, overly complicated, badly designed and massively improbable to get even moderately right that a cottage industry has grown up devoted simply to working around the problem in various ways, because “just” working around the problem will inevitably either drop plenty of advantages of the original approach or mess up something else, or both. Of the ones responsible, someone should have been sacked, and the rest need to revisit the drawing board.
- 2. Actual, honest phrase to denotate the blindingly obvious in simple, approachable tasks. Not actually used — because of the people who discuss the blindingly obvious, few are old or sober enough to regularly throw around phrases like “best practices” — except as part of the attempt of the wink-wink-nudge-nudge contract from usage 1 to assert or insinuate that the design is sane and that the tremendous, life-saving documentation listed in the pretend shape of the blindingly obvious is simply merely a courtesy detail.
Sharepoint?
By Fred Blasdel · 2009.07.27 22:22
I can happily say I’ve never worked with Sharepoint, although I understand that those who have “worked with” it have in fact fought it.
Someone at home in the Cocoa community wondered what this was all about, and I suppose I should say that not all “best practices” documents are like this. However, some are, and there are the overlapping and recurring issues of the author being a raving, misguided fool and the document being a marketing effort designed to curb the onslaught of uncomfortable truths rather than a helpful piece of information.
Sturgeon’s Law definitely applies to the output of the .NET community, but it’s not limited to that. (It merits mentioning that Apple developers, who are so often painted with all Mac users as hipster drones sucked in by marketing, are remarkably clear about what they want from this process and tolerates far less crap than most other congregations.)
By Jesper · 2009.07.28 00:27