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by acimim_ha 771 days ago
Correctness and robustness are not always the requirement. Sometimes it's simplicity. Sometimes it's time-to-market. Sometimes you get fed a broken XML and regex actually does a better job.

I've also been a junior developer and thought that my code has to be correct, look correct and perform correctly. Then I got a boss. Boy I was wrong.

2 comments

> Sometimes you get fed a broken XML

How do you think that XML was generated?

By people who took similar shortcuts, that's how.

Layering badness on top of badness results in a tyre fire.

Performance is another one; there was one benchmark post I read a while ago that compared a stdlib implementation with a custom implementation, and the gist of it was that the stdlib had a few extra safety checks to prevent crashes and the like.

It's setting your sliders. If you have robust and predictable input, you can forego some of the safety checks in favor of performance.

> ... forego some of the safety checks in favor of performance.

Are you a manager at Boeing, by any chance?