[klodolph]

I no longer think that saying is helpful.

The problem is that every problem is caused by a multitude of causes, and there’s usually no clear way to distinguish issues caused by lack of discipline from issues caused by the wrong coding approach or style.

Different styles make different demands on how disciplined a programmer must be in order to write correct code. My experience in well-managed large code base with decent-size teams is that the recommended approaches and coding styles will evolve to address problems that could be solved by asking programmers to be more disciplined.

So that’s the problem with saying “no coding approach will ever solve an issue caused by lack of discipline”—it only makes sense if you already have a good idea of which issues are caused by a lack of discipline, and if you already understand that, then the saying doesn’t help you. The key insight here is to understand when changing your coding approach may allow you to write correct code with less effort (and discipline). But this can’t be distilled into an aphorism, so it won’t get quoted.

An example is holding a lock to access a certain field. If you’re “disciplined” you can just leave a comment on the field that lock X must be held to access it. But in practice, you want to solve that with code analysis. Another issue is using scoped locks so early returns don’t screw you. You can easily argue that these issues aren’t caused by lack of discipline—but if you travel back in time 20 years or so, “discipline” might be the only tool you have to solve them.