This is a great article, something I have noticed but failed to place into a good metaphor like this. The other place this happens is in online code snippets f

This is a great article, something I have noticed but failed to place into a good metaphor like this. The other place this happens is in online code snippets for blogs and the like. If you need a way of doing things, you often search. If you find it, you'll probably copy it. If you find the same thing twice, you'll think everyone does it this way. So the lesson there is to always be careful about code you put into blog posts and stack overflow answers and the like. If you cut a corner, get sloppy with a naming standard or fail to put in basic checks, you're spreading landlines across the world and there's no way of recalling them, because nobody comes back to review a solution they found online.