Post #4144449
2026-07-27 18:58 UTC
@bms@mastodon.bsd.cafe avoiding complexity can indeed be taught but gosh it’s hard. in my own admittedly limited experience of teaching programming the real challenge has always been ‘what question should be answered’ followed by ‘how should this be done’ and that is entirely separate to the coding itself.
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@bms@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-07-27 20:21
@bakachu@infosec.exchange I have found the process of distilling value from an otherwise dead and bitrotted code base boiled down to iteratively applying the dismantling of Chesteron's Fences. Some of the state beyond the code, design motivations and approaches and so forth, involved a person who is now sadly quite dead; he crashed his motorcycle just outside San Francisco over 10 years ago. Also the Don't Repeat Yourself principle from "The Pragmatic Programmer".