Bob on Design

Bob Lee had some interesting comments on the advantages of using annotations rather than XML for configuration. I didn't find the original post as interesting as the comments that followed. Among them was a little pearl of wisdom I think deserves to be embroidered on a pillow:

Contrary to Spring's philosophies, I think very few design decisions are "a matter of taste." Some ways of doing things are provably better than others, and one way of doing something is almost always better than two. Otherwise, you end up with the Perl of frameworks.

Ok. So it would have to be a big pillow. But I've regularly had to deal with co-workers who write code with all public members or write extra methods that are never called -- just in case. They almost always plea 'a matter of taste'.