I'm really surprised by the pushback this sentiment and the related idea of Chesterton's Fence gets from a lot of folks at HN. It seems eminently sensible to me. I understand how some people might think it would promote inertia, tech debt, and a kind of conservatism that can kill companies and institutions, but approached in good faith, I think it can probably prevent a lot of headaches. Surely the point is not to uncritically preserve the status quo, but to interrogate deeply why the status quo is the way that it is, to better decide whether or how a thing should be changed. And surely there is peril in the opposite impulse.
There are two parts to this 1) willingness to challenge the status quo 2) intellectual humility enough to seek to understand why the status quo exists.
There is some conflation of these two concepts in the comment threads.
Probably more software is objectively bad than other things people make, so we are used to looking into the details and immediately making things 10x or 100x better
I think the cavalier attitude stems from the fact that a lot of people work on software that’s really not that important in the grand scheme of things so it’s not a huge deal to break things down, make mistakes, and ship buggy code.
There are a lot more people programming social media sites than there are programming train traffic systems or missile controls—I have a strong feeling those that work on these sorts of projects have a much different attitude.
One of the best documents about software development I've ever encountered was the JSF Air Vehicle C++ Coding Standards by Lockheed Martin [1] - turns out that if you are writing code for multi-million-dollar, nuclear-first-strike-capable weapon platforms, "fail fast, ship updates often" doesn't quite cut it.
>- turns out that if you are writing code for multi-million-dollar, nuclear-first-strike-capable weapon platforms, "fail fast, ship updates often" doesn't quite cut it.
I would try not to write in C++. There are languages that are much safer.
I work in defense for a company called Anduril. I can tell you the code that anduril ships is buggy, hacked together and has basically a huge lack of test coverage.
