Comment by embedding-shape
19 hours ago
Yeah, massive parts of our community and ecosystem miss that something can be right today, and wrong tomorrow, and having to change along with your users and needs is OK. You'll never be able to anticipate what the business needs in the future, so stop pretending your software design can be done once and then just coast on that, because that's typically not how a software project should be run long-term or even medium-term.
The problem with tomorrow is sunk costs. There are many places I wish we had made a difference decision in the past - but we need to balance that with cost to make changes when what we have works okay.
There's also a recency bias, where you ignore how valuable some decision was in the past and ignore the fact that you maybe wouldn't even get to the place you are if "you made a different decision in the past".
I can't count how many times I've said "this is really bad, I it is worth rewriting to fix all the issues", only to discover that there were good reasons for all the past decisions and so we end up with the same mess as before - except that now I know what it must be that way.
Not always, but very often people in the past had good reason for what they did.
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In my experience it comes from the business and people who think if we need to touch the same code twice in the same month it is somehow a moral failing of some kind.