Cargo cult programming (2020)

Legit Critique:

"This is exactly where cargo cult programming (CCP henceforth – it would have been funny to have another C in there, before the P) stems from."

Cargo Cult Computer Programming CCCP is the joke that's been around longer than I've been programming and I started in '81

You know you're old when there's middle aged people born after the USSR no longer existed. Like when I was young adult in the Army (although not for much longer), the USSR was not a LARP or nostalgia, it was like, an active thing.

Its a culture clash.

The Java people have the ISO9000 engineers who are extremely proud of their documented and approved 175 page procedure explaining every detailed step of how its an enormous amount of extra work but technically possible to remove replace and reinstall a 400 Hz power converter.

The Clojure people have the simplicate and add lightness aerospace engineer people who proudly re-engineered the plane's electrical system to not require a 400 Hz power converter anymore, resulting in a lighter, faster, cheaper, more reliable, simpler aircraft. Follow the money... can't sell replacement parts if the plane doesn't use them, so you can guess what corporate thinks of "simplicate and add lightness" designs. Much like in software there's an expanding gap between software people try to sell you vs software you paid to develop for yourself.

The cognitive load on the dev is higher, but its technically possible to write lispy functional style programs in Java if you follow rules about versions and if you drag all the other required complexity of Java into it ... its just simpler to write in Clojure.

For me the article reads like something between a bunch of truisms and outright straw man bashing.

I half expected the author to tell me that waterfall is bad[0].

Last but not least, the interesting programs quite often aren't written with perfect knowledge of the domain. You often have to push forward even though the uncertainty is there. "Why did you write it this way?" "Because I didn't know how to write it and I needed to write something to move forward." "Ah-ha! Cargo cult! I am so smart!"

[0] Waterfall is also a bit of a straw man https://ultimatesdlc.com/father-waterfall/

Agreed. According to the article, if I didn't write a factory class with the knowledge that it was described in the GoF book, then I'm cargo culting, regardless of whether I understand its value as a creational pattern or not. If I also wrote that class using TDD and have never read Kent Beck or Bob C. Martin, then I'm also cargo culting.

The advantage of having it in a commit message vs a comment is that there's no chance of the comment just hanging around once it inevitably becomes irrelevant. Once it's irrelevant it's anti-productive to leave it in. Since there is no direct link between a comment and the code it applies to (it could be at the top of the function or class, for example), it's also really easy to forget removing it once it is no longer relevant.