[munchbunny]

"Use the right tool for the right job" is the final stage of "first, learn the rules, then learn when to break them."

The difficulty with that advice is that it doesn't become applicable until you've gotten maybe 5 years worth of humble pies thrown in your face, for moments where you realize in retrospect that you made the wrong call.

Until then you don't have enough of a body of experience to tell two very different scenarios apart: "things are this way because my predecessors already learned the hard lessons" vs. "things are this way because my predecessors didn't know better."

Paradigms are really useful in practice as a shortcut to implementing 80% of the wisdom until you begin to learn the remaining 20%, and one of the roles of senior engineers is to make sure junior engineers don't mistake the 80% for the 20%.

[a1369209993]

> "things are this way because my predecessors already learned the hard lessons" vs. "things are this way because my predecessors didn't know better."

This is just Chesterton's Fence again, and has the same refutation: if you're putting up a fence that serves some long-term purpose, it is your responsibility to put signs on it explaining what that purpose is. Otherwise people are right to assume it's one of the overwhelming majority of fences that do not, in fact, serve any purpose beyond obstructing their movement.

[munchbunny]

if you're putting up a fence that serves some long-term purpose, it is your responsibility to put signs on it explaining what that purpose is. Otherwise people are right to assume it's one of the overwhelming majority of fences that do not, in fact, serve any purpose beyond obstructing their movement.

Your approach absolves yourself of exercising agency to discern purpose in fences that lack signage in a real world where plenty of purposeful fences lack signage. Just because it’s someone else’s responsibility doesn’t mean they actually do it, and just because they didn’t put a sign there doesn’t mean you’re blameless if you cause a service outage.

I work with cryptography and it would take a book to put adequate signage on some fences. Nobody’s going to write why they’re using AES GCM every time they use AES in that code.

[mdpopescu]

Sure, that makes a lot of sense, and it's a sensible demand when there are a million people, each putting up one fence.

However, when you write the same architecture over and over, you don't write an explanation each time - for various reasons, a not insignificant one being that there's no obvious place to put it. (I use dependency injection in my code. Where should I explain why - on each class? In a separate file in the project? In the documentation? Should I write documentation, then? What if I write it and others continue to "new" services inside their code?)