Simon Willison’s Weblog

Interviewing a developer for whom English wasn’t his first language and he kept calling legacy code “legendary code” and now that’s all I want to write.

— Mark Norman Francis # 17th July 2018, 5:43 pm

Code is like a poem; it’s not just something we write to reach some practical result. Sometimes people that are far from the Redis philosophy suggest using other code written by other authors (frequently in other languages) in order to implement something Redis currently lacks. But to us this is like if Shakespeare decided to end Enrico IV using the Paradiso from the Divina Commedia. Is using any external code a bad idea? Not at all. Like in “One Thousand and One Nights” smaller self contained stories are embedded in a bigger story, we’ll be happy to use beautiful self contained libraries when needed. At the same time, when writing the Redis story we’re trying to write smaller stories that will fit in to other code.

— The Redis Manifesto # 2nd March 2018, 7:11 pm

By far the most important lesson I took out of this game is that whenever there’s behavior that needs to be repeated around to multiple types of entities, it’s better to default to copypasting it than to abstracting/generalizing it too early. This is a very very hard thing to do in practice. As programmers we’re sort of wired to see repetition and want to get rid of it as fast as possible, but I’ve found that that impulse generally creates more problems than it solves. The main problem it creates is that early generalizations are often wrong, and when a generalization is wrong it ossifies the structure of the code around it in a way that is harder to fix and change than if it wasn’t there in the first place.

— SSYGEN # 26th February 2018, 5:23 am