this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
54 points (100.0% liked)
Programming
19177 readers
194 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Consistency is NOT the most important thing. Correctness is. This guy has been in the trenches flinging shit too long. I work with vendors and do my best to use the subset of their product that actually works correctly. I don't want new features to work like shit just because the old ones did too.
I found the title of that section slightly triggering too, but the argument they lay down actually makes sense. Consistency helps you to achieve correctness in large codebases, because it means you don’t have to reinvent what is correct over and over in separate pockets of the codebase. Such pockets also make incremental improvements to the codebase harder and harder, so they do come back to bite you.
Your example of vendors doesn’t relate to that, because you don’t control your vendor’s code. But you do control your organisation’s.
Consistency as a means to correctness still means correctness is the more important aspect. Far too many projects and people that go hard on some methodologies and practices lose sight of their main goal and start focusing on the methods instead. Even to the point were the methods are no longer working toward the goal they originally set out to accomplish.
Always have the goal in mind, once your practices start to interfere with that goal then it is time to rethink them.
I’m not arguing against that. Merely providing some counterweight to the idea that the author was “flinging shit in the trenches” 😅