I think this may be a scissor statement for developers [0] as people seem to really be on one side or the other. I remember years ago I wrote a Java package to

I think this may be a scissor statement for developers [0] as people seem to really be on one side or the other. I remember years ago I wrote a Java package to sit on top of DOMs and let you query and manipulate in memory. People at my company liked it and so maybe like 20-30 people used it as the in memory store for passing info around this workflow engine. Anyway, I assumed you would always have a DOM or some Nodes and if you didn’t, allowed null pointer exceptions to throw in the right places (what I thought was right). Some people liked starting with null and populating later and my logic would blow them up. My response was “fix your code, don’t do that.” My package was clearly documented for what to do and when. But one day another senior dev came to me to plead the case for some mids who were writing all this extra code to prehandle those nulls. I still didn’t change my package because I thought it was most efficient to use it properly than to add in extra logic that sort of broke the interface. I did tell them that I welcomes a pull request to add the functionality. Looking back, I wish I had been more liberal in what I accepted because it was causing a lot of emotional pain by people sort of lobbying others. “Minimal bugs” depends on where in the stack you look. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/