Politics #

Institutions and Refactoring #

I listened to https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-deutsch/ today, and was also thinking about code cleanliness at work. These ideas meshed in my mind to draw the following analogy:

There is often the temptation in software development to do a complete rewrite of some code. This is tempting because it promises that the clean model in your head for how things should work could be reality, and you wouldn’t have to deal with the current system with its quirks and bad models any longer. This is dangerous because within all those quirks exist real decisions made by prior developers that handle real use cases. Many of these decisions will inevitably be lost in the re-write, and will need to be re-discovered and patched over time, which is duplicate work.

In the podcast David mentions that he is a fan of evolutionary societal change, where existing institutions are respected and changed slowly, instead of being torn down in a revolution. I think this is kinda similar to the idea of incrementally changing code, as opposed to rewriting it from scratch. Institutions (I assume) also have many quirks and patched edge cases that carry real, hard won value. Erasing all that may be more destructive that it seems in the mind’s eye.

Categories: Understanding The World