The Dark Side Of Reuse

Every branch that bears fruit, he prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.
– John 15:2

Deleting code feels so good, especially when it’s code I’ve written. It’s an emotion predicted by the Creator’s Curse, and it also make sense under the lens of this article, which challenges developers to write code that’s “easy to delete”.

Too often, especially in academic settings, or with inexperienced engineers who don’t have the experience of the dirty hacks required to keep an actual real-life system running, there’s a view that good software engineering practices are like the Ten Commandments, never to be violated. But for every rule, there’s any number of exceptions, and I loved the way the author laid out these tensions.