I was mistaken. I appreciated the correction. It was helpful. The language "This is mistaken" was correct, and I took no offense to either being mistaken or being called on it by MaxBarraclough. That was a helpful comment, and it's valuable when people call out mistakes.
There is such a principle. I didn't know about that framing. Now I do. Yay!
I don't even disagree with the principle. I disagree with the one-liner summary of the principle, as well as the longer summary in the blog post. The principle should be stated in terms of specific design disciplines:
* Declarative > imperative, when you don't need imperative
* Functional > structured, when you don't need mutations
Etc.
On the topic of conversations: I know this wasn't done here, but I don't even mind having my code, comments, or emails called stupid. They often are (yours are too -- aimed at whomever might be reading this -- everyone does stupid things and makes mistakes). I only mind if there's a personal subtext. Although that's not common, high-performing engineering cultures are able to discuss things people do with strong language, and having that not be judgmental of the people themselves. That's a difficult skill and culture to develop, but it's super-nice to be in one if you can get there. You can share things early (when there is a lot of stupid), learn a lot, get a lot of feedback, and give a lot of feedback.
Everyone does stupid things, and organizations work better when those are caught and corrected early, when it feeds into learning (and, as prerequisite, when it doesn't feed into ego or performance management).
Thanks. The intended tone of my comment was to be factual and direct, not to be derogatory. Pointing out a mistake is certainly not the equivalent of calling someone stupid.
I also agree that sometimes it's a mistake to use a language that may later turn out not to be powerful enough. Consider ugly build-system languages that were once fully declarative but had to evolve imperative features to cope with difficult cases. They would have been better off using something like Python from the start.
I will also admit to misreading the comment. I initially read it as calling the principle mistaken, but I think the word choice is perfectly fine now that I understand the target.
