Understanding the rationale behind a rule when trying to circumvent it

(devblogs.microsoft.com)

32 points | by tosh 3 hours ago

4 comments

  • JohnMakin 1 hour ago
    Am reminded reading this of an esteemed and since passed away colleague who had written windows driver code since the dos days and may have had decades of insanely archaic knowledge die with him - when working on a difficult piece of windows driver code years ago, he said to me in a thick eastern europe accent as best i can remember “you make the primary mistake of thinking anything in windows makes sense. once you abandon this bias, you may someday hope to get where i am”
  • techwizrd 16 minutes ago
    This seems adjacent to Chesterton's Fence, though maybe not the canonical form of it.

    For anyone not familiar with the term, Chesterton's Fence is the idea that you should understand why a rule exists before trying to remove it or work around it: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

    Here the issue is not that the rule was removed, but that the code followed the wording while missing the reason the rule existed.

  • OneManHorde 2 hours ago
    Microsoft is so broken that an employee finds it easier to write a blog post about a documentation improvement than simply making that improvement? Explains a lot. "Conway's Flaw?"
    • throawayonthe 1 hour ago
      the blog says the documentation improvement was made in 2020? presumably not by the post author either
    • chadgpt3 40 minutes ago
      Always been that way
  • ElenaDaibunny 49 minutes ago
    of course they had to add dont wait for your worker thread in 2020