4 ms·

At first, you're ignorant. Then, dogmatic. And then you learn what to apply and when. Due to the average age of programmers, a lot of people fall into the firs

• hinkley 4y ago
  An analogy that seems to connect with some people at least: You know the Martial Arts movie trope where 20 minutes into the movie, the master tells the student never to do X, and then in the final battle the student only triumphs by doing X? That's because what you can do and what you should do changes as you figure out what you're doing. The rule applies to you until you understand why the rule doesn't apply to you/this situation. The subtlety here is in knowing the difference between "the rules don't apply to me" and "I understand the situation where the rule is reasonable, and safe, and either this is not one of those situations, or 'safe' doesn't address an even bigger danger." The former is the origin story of the villain, the latter the origin story of the unlikely hero. Or less dramatically, it's Chesterton's Fence.