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Re:Software Is Made Between Commits by hinkley on Thursday June 11, 2026 @04:41PM (#48496133)
I think a good argument ad absurdum for this is to look at how some recipe sites give the entire genealogical history of the author and an anecdote about how their gammy met Theodore Roosevelt and he stole her pen. Three pages later I discover I need to go to the grocery store because the recipe requires sour cream. And the store is closed so I need a different recipe.

Don't fucking do that. Do something way less than halfway to that line.

Re:Software Is Made Between Commits by jimbokun on Thursday June 11, 2026 @07:35PM (#48497888)
Agree on the software case. Disagree about the recipes.

Food writing is its own genre where the recipe is one part of a larger story. Can often include travel stories as well.

Maybe not your thing. But definitely has its place.

Re:Software Is Made Between Commits by hinkley on Thursday June 11, 2026 @10:12PM (#48499039)
Can we agree that this flavor of recipe writing should not be applied to software? That's the point I was going for (hence the ad absurdum header)
Re:Software Is Made Between Commits by jason_oster on Friday June 12, 2026 @04:10AM (#48501288)
Tangents and non-sequiturs are unlike false starts and refactoring that are common while designing software.

To make your recipe analogy relevant, learning that the original called for three eggs and that was changed to one egg with just slightly more butter in 1930 to save money during the Great Depression is excellent information if you want to make the dish in the traditional way.

Ideas are rarely conceived pristine and fully formed. They require a great deal of experimentation. Knowing what doesn't work is just as valuable as knowing what does. The worst problem in science, technology, and education is that people almost never publish negative results [1] [2] [3].

What inevitably happens is that a beginner learns "the right way to do it", and then thinks they can be clever by taking some shortcut. Which of course always causes some problems they could not have anticipated. It's only after the fact that someone else comes along and fixes the problems that were introduced, and then scolds the beginner saying, "don't do that!" knowing full well they themselves also had to learn it the hard way.

The total number of times the same mistakes have been repeated is probably uncountable because they are so rarely documented. Luckily, there is interest in fixing this [4].

[1]: https://doi.org/10.24918/cs.2023.39

[2]: https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/38829-the-value-of-publishi...

[3]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11083460/

[4]: https://grad.uic.edu/news-stories/illuminating-the-ugly-side...