Resisting Cognitive Surrender
https://knlb.dev/essays/surrenderPreviously, pretty much everyone all agreed on YAGNI and KISS because code was so expensive to create and more expensive to maintain. Now the code generation is "free" - but at a design level, YAGNI and KISS do still matter. But they are enforced now only by sheer will power. You have to actively restrain the code from being created if you don't want it. Perfectly good code - I can't even fault it. I just know, if it doesn't need to exist yet, it's a mistake to create it earlier than needed.
> La perfection est atteinte non pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à retirer.
> Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
On the same theme:
> the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience
- Einstein
> I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time
- Pascal
> Simplicity is a great virtue but requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate, and, to make matters worse, complexity sells better.
- Dijkstra.