Yeah, massive parts of our community and ecosystem miss that something can be right today, and wrong tomorrow, and having to change along with your users and needs is OK. You'll never be able to anticipate what the business needs in the future, so stop pretending your software design can be done once and then just coast on that, because that's typically not how a software project should be run long-term or even medium-term.

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bluGill 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The problem with tomorrow is sunk costs. There are many places I wish we had made a difference decision in the past - but we need to balance that with cost to make changes when what we have works okay.

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rafaelmn 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There's also a recency bias, where you ignore how valuable some decision was in the past and ignore the fact that you maybe wouldn't even get to the place you are if "you made a different decision in the past".

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bluGill 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I can't count how many times I've said "this is really bad, I it is worth rewriting to fix all the issues", only to discover that there were good reasons for all the past decisions and so we end up with the same mess as before - except that now I know what it must be that way.

Not always, but very often people in the past had good reason for what they did.

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xp84 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As relevant today as it was 26 years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

See also: Chesterton's Fence

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edoceo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Those are the comments that should persist in the code. I hate when the AI edits and removes my "why" comments. I want the refactor to make it less messy but keep why it's that kind of mess.

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bluGill 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Too Soon often we thought those were obvious and didn't comment. Meanwhile there are detailed comments about things nobody cares about.

	▲	tisdadd an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I just put a comment in yesterday for this very reason - there was a flag I had set to false, and then looking at the library docs for something else thought maybe it should be true but that doesn't work how I would have implemented it if I had created the library and written the docs how I did. It is a very capable library, and when I first started using it the docs were more Oracle docs looking - but I could find what I wanted easily. Now, it is much more annoying to delve through but looks more modern.

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collabs 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In my experience it comes from the business and people who think if we need to touch the same code twice in the same month it is somehow a moral failing of some kind.