Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

We don’t think any lesson here should be taken as an “always true” type thing.

A "justification" implies that there is a compromise being made in the name of performance. It's very reasonable to choose, in the first iteration of a program, to choose to disregard performance concerns in favor of readability, which is exactly the context of how they framed it.

When you make the big initial decisions based on readability, that informs all the rest of your choices in working on that piece of code. If you skip a few steps ahead because e.g. "we're making some extra database calls here, so we should grab all the data we need the first time instead", you'll find it much more difficult to optimize your way back to the most readable code possible.

Is it the only way to write software? Of course not. And it may make more sense for the systems and frameworks they use than for yours. But I for one admire their willingness to have a point of view and a principle when it comes to writing code. I don't think it's madness. And I don't think you're wrong either. I just don't think you would have been a good fit for their team. By putting their philosophy out there, they help make that clear. And likewise! I don't begrudge your philosophy, and I think it's often correct. But please don't accuse others of drama and clickbait for describing strong opinions.

(though unlike most of the startups on that blog, Pagedraw seems to be shutting down in the most open and responsible way)

Software isn't exactly like buying groceries where you can go to a different grocer and get a different, equivalent solution. Instead, it's more like a bakery, where a baker has their own (in software terms, proprietary) recipe that they use. If that bakery goes away, their recipe might go too, and that would directly affect those who buy their bread, especially if it was a joint that sold to other businesses, as software normally is. If I were that baker, and I went bankrupt, I would probably give that recipe to my customers- after all, I can't profit off of it, but they still need it.

Unless I'm extremely mistaken, they haven't been bought by anyone else and won't be resuming operations ever. If they had been bought out, that would be different- their storefront would still exist, albeit somewhere else, likely- and people would still be able to get your products.

I am a believer in Right to Repair, and the overall principle here is similar- documentation of products is really helpful in fixing things, and if a company goes out of business, and has no recourse or any way to deliver support, it would be amazing for customers if they publicly released as much documentation as possible.

To be clear, I don't think that using an old thing forever is a good idea, but it often takes a long time to find something else that fits the bill perfectly.