I'm puzzled, most of my adult life I believed that using absolute paths are one of the tell-tell signs of bad programmers.

It's hardcoded paths that are a sign of shoddy programming. If anything, hardcoded relative paths are probably worse than hardcoded absolute paths, merely because somebody's going to run the thing from a different directory at some point.

With that said, I use hardcoded paths all the time in QAD one-off scripts that I don't intend to redistribute or deploy for production use, and I have occasionally caught myself using one in production. But it's much better to put the path in a configuration file, take it from the command line arguments, or grab the current directory at startup time.

"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."  — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68

In reply to Re: Best practices - absolute paths? by jonadab
in thread Best practices - absolute paths? by Eyck

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