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].
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...