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The pattern (which I employ only sometimes) is to have almost all literals defined in this way. Perhaps SELECT isn’t likely to be the word you misspell, but I’m a careless typist and make 10 typos a minute. Taking this added step helps your editor save you from yourself.


Having standards like that and keeping them helps a lot. Next time you have a different keyword, you don't have to think "does it deserve a constant?" - all of them do.

Similar to how linters stop you from overthinking indentation in specific cases, or some naming standards, and later rename/reformat-wars.


all of them do.

That's what leads to dogmatic cargo-culting. Good software is written by thinking about the circumstances and doing what makes the most sense, not by mindless rule-following that don't always make sense.

I don't know why someone would be so worried about typos and introduce more verbosity and redundancy in the process; but then again, I don't use an IDE and I've never had this problem.


I'm not sure you're really making the argument you think here...

Good software may mean thinking about circumstances like "we're dealing with lots of text parsing and have seen bugs from typos in common keywords" and doing what makes most sense: "let's prevent those in the future, but using constants for keywords". It's only cargo culting if you don't know why you're doing something.

Setting a rule so you don't have to debate something later is a valid solution and may still offset some redundancies introduced this way.




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