[rincewind]

Sometimes I think anti-recommendations (e.g. asyncio) are far more useful. You don't learn a lot from many open source libraries or standard library modules if you try to imitate them. You must understand that this code is a compromise, then they stuck with it for compatibility reasons, and today you could have a much better API or simpler implementation if you started from scratch.

[Spivak]

But that’s true for code that was written yesterday too. All code makes compromises and has to deal with constraints. Understanding what someone did given their lot is still valuable.