The fact that that Seth Godins blog post that denigrates 'yak shaving' comes so prominent on web search for the term is really too bad - but he is not even a pr

The fact that that Seth Godins blog post that denigrates 'yak shaving' comes so prominent on web search for the term is really too bad - but he is not even a programmer! I believe that any healthy programmers culture supports yak shaving. The metaphor is an expression of how frustrating is to do the right thing, but it would not be a virtue if it was easy. Yak shaving is the only sane way to maintain a big codebase. The more popular thing, and the root of all evil, is to add work arounds that mask the real problem instead of finding the right place for it somewhere deep down in the code. It is like: you discover a bug in a library that you use and instead of fixing it and sending patches to the author you just add a special case to deal with it. The result is that the code gets more and more irregular with special cases everywhere.