Simplicity of code post

hugo/content/posts/2024-07-24-philosophy-of-code.md

@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+---
+lastmod: "2024-07-24T17:38:00.0000000+01:00"
+author: patrick
+date: "2024-07-24T17:38:00.0000000+01:00"
+title: Code having "the right philosophy"
+summary: "Those who would give up essential safety, to purchase a little temporary simplicity, deserve (and will get) neither safety nor simplicity."
+---
+
+[Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41032806):
+
+> Time library can be simple, it's just rust libraries tend to be philosophic for some reason, but it's only one of many design approaches.
+
+Certainly a true statement.
+
+I claim that the "some reason" here is that this "philosophic" design approach is correct, and the other ones aren't.
+Most standard libraries (.NET, Golang, Python) don't care about correctness enough that they'd actually *model the domains* in question, so they don't, so they make it trivial to write completely unnecessary bugs.
+
+As evidence, I submit the fact that I have twice had to rewrite someone else's .NET code to fix time-related bugs in it, whose ultimate direct cause was "the .NET `DateTime` type is an extremely bad model for dates-and-times in the world".
+In one of those two cases, I ended up completely rewriting the entire application, using NodaTime to drive the date-time computations, because that's a library that actually attempts to model dates-and-times.
+
+Those who would give up essential safety, to purchase a little temporary simplicity, deserve (and will get) neither safety nor simplicity.