[devishard]

Ugh, your problem thinking runs too deep for me to power through.

1. Let's say I do things the way you suggest: I use different versions of your code simultaneously. 3 years in I have 5 versions of your code and I find a bug in my code in an area from the second version. Now I have to know 5 libraries to understand the code and I'm constantly getting tripped up by the subtle differences between versions 2 and 3.

2. So to fix this plan I finally persuade my boss to give me a week to address tech debt. With your search-and-replace plan, except I forget to do it in the library that Bob the contractor kept in a separate repo before we fired him. And then there's the separate problem of when I passed it into a function that took a function pointer and so the name is different and not find-and-replacable as being the same function. And then there's the place where Joe, who is a good programmer but kind of inexperienced, poor kid, he thought he'd simplify things by creating a macro that inserts the number, and this got past code review because I reviewed it right after a meeting with the client from hell. So now nothing is working after the find-replace, it takes us the entire week to figure out why, and we don't get to spend any of our tech debt time fixing the place where Bob the contractor decided it would be a good idea to "optimize" the graph generation functions.

For the record, I'm speaking from experience here. The way you wrote this code is an ideology I've worked with before and it's miserable to consume libraries written in this style. You can argue for the "benefits" all you want but I've eaten this dog food before and I'm not going to eat it again.