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They both cut in the same direction: preserving the status quo. Don’t go around removing stuff you don’t fully understand. And don’t go around adding stuff you
by legalcorrection 4y ago
They both cut in the same direction: preserving the status quo. Don’t go around removing stuff you don’t fully understand. And don’t go around adding stuff you don’t understand.
- Thorrez 4y agoThe border between adding and keeping can get blurry. If you're creating a new module based on an existing module, is it appropriate to copy the boilerplate even if you don't understand all of it? What if you're renaming a file, do you have to understand everything in the file?
- legalcorrection 4y agoTo the first question, it depends. If it's something you're building for a business, and its reliability is important, then you probably should understand code you're copy-pasting. For a hobby project, it's probably not as important. The whole point of Chesterton's Fence is that there's wisdom encoded in the way things have been done. The previous guy who worked on the same module was probably somewhat competent, and in any case, the component was fulfilling business needs for all that time, so they were doing something right.