[meribold]

> I had to have a multi-day argument over the precise way to define constants in Perl

Couldn't you have used whatever the other person was suggesting even if the change was pointless?

[zimpenfish]

These days, I would, yeah, but this was a long time ago and I was a lot more invested in not letting nonsense go past without a fight.

[JohnBooty]

Yeah it's one of those things where it's like...

...okay, I can let this nonsense go today with very little impact, but if I do... will the team need to deal with it 100 times in the future? (And more broadly, by silence am I contributing to the evolution of a bad engineering culture ruled by poor understandings?)

It is very very difficult to know where to draw the line.

[Izkata]

Three axes in my mind to take into account: Likelihood, impact, and complexity. The article seems to mostly be about likelihood and complexity. I'd place more importance on impact and complexity. It's worth saving a headache later if it's simple to do right now, however unlikely it is, as long as it doesn't create a maintenance burden before that point.