Need help in sorting the programming buzz-words

Question

How do you sort out the good buzz from the bad buzz? - I really need your help here :)

I see a lot of buzz-words nowadays, both here on SO and in school. For example, we had a teacher who everyone respected, who said "be careful about gold-plating and death-by-interfacing". Now, everyone and their mama cries whenever I'm creating an interface..

Another example would be here on SO where lately "premature optimization is the root of all evil", so everytime someone asks a perfomance question, he'll get that sentence thrown in his face. A few months ago I remember it was all about NHibernate in here, etc., etc...

These things comes and goes, but only the good buzz stays. Now, how do you seperate the good from the bad? By reading blogs from respected persons? By trying to come to a conclusion on your own, and then try to convince others that you're right? By simply ignoring it?

Answer 1

I guess there is only one way to figure out this and you already named it - good buzz stays.

Answer 2

If/when someone says one of those blanket statements to you always ask them "Why?".

If the answer makes sense and applies to what you were doing then it's probably worth heeding.

If the answer is "Ummm" or "Because Joel said so" feel free to ignore it. :-)

Answer 3

The important thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet. Whenever there's a new technology, a lot of people will try them on a lot of different problems, and after a while a (loose) consensus emerges regarding the fit of the technology to different domains. Whenever somebody is using one technology for everything, you can be sure that they are either doing only slight variations on the same thing or using a badly fitting technology most of the time.

Answer 4

Most buzz revolves around a reasonably good idea. It's rare that something hyped doesn't include a good idea that'd be worth knowing. At the same time, there's the tendency to want silver bullets.

Ultimately there's no substitute for

• trusting your own common sense as to the worth of said buzz. It's important to recognize that you have expertise as well, and your own opinion is not worthless. Some "experts" are just opinionated people who are louder.
• humility in the face of the knowledge that lots of people who're doing this are smarter than you are and if your common sense tells you they're full of it you may very well be missing the point.

Of course it doesn't help that these two statements are mutually contradictory. Now if we could only find the right buzzword to tell us which to apply in any given situation...

Answer 5

The "premature optimization" buzz-word is definitvely around for quite some time and many of us have had to learn it by experience. Other buzzwords are nice to check out, but one shouldn't base decisions on them.

Answer 6

I think it really comes down to experience. Premature optimization, in my opinion, is pretty logical. Why optimize everything before the code flow is largely complete? Sometimes you are surprised by what needs to be optimized and what doesn't. I've made this premature optimization mistake before.

When you see a buzzword, research it a little, find out what it's about and form your own opinion. If your opinion is different than everyone else's, then maybe do a post and find out why your opinion is different.

For example, I still disagree with Test Driven Development, unless I am contracting out my coding, then I'll write the tests that need to be passed. I figured I was missing something since my opinion was different. But, asking other developers, who I have a lot of respect for, and non-developers too, almost all had the same opinion I did. I can certainly think of numerous cases where TDD would be valuable and applicable, but at this time it's not a buzzword for me.