[kbenson]

> If you don't explain in documentation (e.g. comments) why you went the more complicated route, someone might come along and "simplify" things to incorrectness, and the best case is they'll rediscover what you already knew in the first place, and fix their own mistake, wasting time in the process.

I've done this to myself. It sucks. Revisiting years old code is often like reading something someone else entirely wrote, and you can be tempted to think when looking at an overly complex solution that you were just confused when you wrote it and it's easily simplified (which can be true! We hopefully grow and become better as time goes on), instead of the fact that you're missing the extra complexity of the problem which is just out of sight.

[cecilpl2]

I have once or twice embarked on what I was sure was a well-thought-out, solid refactoring job, only to find that after a long process of cleaning, pulling out common code, and adding the special-case logic, I had refactored myself in a giant circle.

Every step of the process seemed like a local improvement, and yet I ended up where I started. It was like the programming equivalent of the Escher staircase: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UCtTbdWdyOs/hqdefault.jpg.

[azernik]

Reminds me of the theoretical model of stored-data encryption - it's the same as encrypting communication, only you're sending data from your past self to your future self :-D