I found the title of that section slightly triggering too, but the argument they lay down actually makes sense. Consistency helps you to achieve correctness in large codebases, because it means you don’t have to reinvent what is correct over and over in separate pockets of the codebase. Such pockets also make incremental improvements to the codebase harder and harder, so they do come back to bite you.
Your example of vendors doesn’t relate to that, because you don’t control your vendor’s code. But you do control your organisation’s.
Consistency as a means to correctness still means correctness is the more important aspect. Far too many projects and people that go hard on some methodologies and practices lose sight of their main goal and start focusing on the methods instead. Even to the point were the methods are no longer working toward the goal they originally set out to accomplish.
Always have the goal in mind, once your practices start to interfere with that goal then it is time to rethink them.
I found the title of that section slightly triggering too, but the argument they lay down actually makes sense. Consistency helps you to achieve correctness in large codebases, because it means you don’t have to reinvent what is correct over and over in separate pockets of the codebase. Such pockets also make incremental improvements to the codebase harder and harder, so they do come back to bite you.
Your example of vendors doesn’t relate to that, because you don’t control your vendor’s code. But you do control your organisation’s.
Consistency as a means to correctness still means correctness is the more important aspect. Far too many projects and people that go hard on some methodologies and practices lose sight of their main goal and start focusing on the methods instead. Even to the point were the methods are no longer working toward the goal they originally set out to accomplish.
Always have the goal in mind, once your practices start to interfere with that goal then it is time to rethink them.
I’m not arguing against that. Merely providing some counterweight to the idea that the author was “flinging shit in the trenches” 😅