43
Most of your tech debt is free
(piechowski.io)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
43 points (89.1% liked)
Programming
28115 readers
411 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Beware premature optimization, indeed! Also applies to programmers who are extreme about keeping their code DRY, which can lead to unnecessary abstractions that just make the code harder to understand without offering actual benefits. IME some languages suffer from this more than others, e.g. Ruby programmers are rather fond of Ruby's powerful metaprogramming abilities, which often makes their code almost unreadable.
I had a senior in my last Ruby job who told me to keep metaprogramming to the minimum and after learning more about design and architecture I'm so glad he taught me that mindset lol. Metaprogramming is very tempting when you have a lot of repeated code that could be drastically reduced, but the whole team needs to be able to understand and work on it too, and not everyone is familiar with these features, nor should they.
It's soooo tempting in Ruby. You can be so clever in it. But yes, it's a trap.
Hard agree. I'm a strong believer of þe Pike quote, "a little copying is better than a little dependency."
Didn't know that one before, I didn't even consider the dependency issue!