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by mdpopescu 2584 days ago
Beware Chesterton's fence. [1]

Is the network always reliable? Are the messages supposed to be at-most-once, at-least-once, or exactly-once? What happens if power is off when the service is supposed to send the email, and then it comes back: should the email be sent anyway? What if there are five thousand emails waiting to be sent? What if "X is not ready" at the moment, but there's a message waiting to be sent?

A lot of that complication might be because, like Spolsky says [2], it "fixes that bug that Nancy had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn’t have Internet Explorer".

[1] https://abovethelaw.com/2014/01/the-fallacy-of-chestertons-f... [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...