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Developer Fallacies

• kjax 11y ago
  While I certainly agree with most of these, I feel that the Daphne & Celeste fallacy needs a bit of elaboration. Code readability is somewhat correlated to its maintainability, all else being equal. If you're writing messy code that could be greatly clarified by extracting a variable or adding an extra line, experience has taught me that one should typically do so. Of course there are always performance, style, and other concerns, but abstractions are a key component of software development, as they allow us to do things like extract or isolate necessarily "messy" bits of code. I like the WAI-ARIA example, as it clearly fits with the fallacy, but just using that css snippet as a supporting example reads a bit like a bifurcation fallacy. Ugly code is not necessarily poor code, but it can sometimes indicate a missed opportunity for abstraction or refactoring.
• paulddraper 11y ago
  "The number of records in a database has no relationship to the complexity of that database’s overall structure." Huh? This is absolutely false. As data size and throughput requirements increase ("scale"), the structure of data changes. It may be indices, denormalization, paradigm changes (NoSQL), or sharding. You don't just slap sharding on an existing arbitrary database structure. It has to be designed with that in mind. The author has good points, and I believe in YAGNI too. But this statement is just false.