
Developer Fallacies - bpierre
http://www.heydonworks.com/article/developer-fallacies
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kjax
While I certainly agree with most of these, I feel that the Daphne & Celeste
fallacy needs a bit of elaboration.

Code readability is somewhat correlated to its maintainability, all else being
equal. If you're writing messy code that could be greatly clarified by
extracting a variable or adding an extra line, experience has taught me that
one should typically do so.

Of course there are always performance, style, and other concerns, but
abstractions are a key component of software development, as they allow us to
do things like extract or isolate necessarily "messy" bits of code. I like the
WAI-ARIA example, as it clearly fits with the fallacy, but just using that css
snippet as a supporting example reads a bit like a bifurcation fallacy. Ugly
code is not necessarily poor code, but it can sometimes indicate a missed
opportunity for abstraction or refactoring.

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paulddraper
"The number of records in a database has no relationship to the complexity of
that database’s overall structure."

Huh? This is absolutely false. As data size and throughput requirements
increase ("scale"), the structure of data changes. It may be indices,
denormalization, paradigm changes (NoSQL), or sharding. You don't just slap
sharding on an existing arbitrary database structure. It has to be designed
with that in mind.

The author has good points, and I believe in YAGNI too. But this statement is
just false.

