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by necovek 1027 days ago
TBH, this doesn't sound more useful than saying "make mistakes impossible".

No surprise it hasn't caught up outside Japan like "kanban", "lean", "stop-the-line" etc have.

1 comments

Having a wordvfor it tells you "This is an established thing people do".

Saying "Make mistakes impossible" invites people to say "Lol you can't, and why do you want to help idiot users anyway". Part of the software community right now seems to think "git gud" is the answer to mistakes and you don't need anything else.

New terms are introduced to have a meaning longer than the replacement.

If people say "you can't make mistakes impossible" but not "you can't poka yoke that", it's not about the terms.

Obviously, you can't make mistakes impossible, but the intent should be clear only if the reader wants it to be clear, and it's not much difference to "poka yoke it".

> Having a wordvfor it tells you “This is an established thing people do”.

Words are coined for fictional, hypothetical, and/or idealized things that people don’t actually do all the time.

Words and phrases like “reincarnation”, “sorcery”, and “free markets” exist, that doesn’t mean that they correspond to phenomena that actually occur in the real world.