The risk of a well presented opinion
Some days ago I’ve seen an article on Medium about Javascript’s `while` loops and `.map()` functions and something worrying came to my mind: How could someone give to a mere opinion such an aura of truth? The article (that I will not link for obvious reasons) stated that JavaScript programmers should start using `.map()` instead of `while`. The title was an imperative order like “Stop using while” and the arguments through the text were quite interesting: Readability, easy to use, code cleanness, etc.
The caveat? It’s wrong! Although some people rather use `.map()` instead of `while` because of said arguments, there are some cases where you should use the latter instead of the former.
Medium is giving voice to people without or too little knowledge. It’s an open stage to people voice their opinions that sometimes can mislead and wrong. As it hides the comments, an unwarned user could take such opinion as truth without discussion, follow it and end up by going through a wrong path, learning the wrong concepts, learning the worst practices as good.
It should have tools to grade the information per user experience or, at least, provide a way to show when a misleading information is shared and help unwarned users identify bad sources of information.
Like our present world, the “fake knowledge” (a type of fake news, I think) is swarming the Internet and we need to help detect and eliminate it anyway we can.
