If I drive too fast and I get caught, I may get a ticket. If I drive under the influence and get caught, I may go to jail. If I turn my radio up too loud in the middle of the night and my neighbors call the police, I may get into trouble if I don’t stop it. The law basically protects us from causing trouble with each other. Why don’t we have a law against irresponsible coding?
Software is part of my life. It actually is my life, not just part of it. I stare at this MacBook for much more time every day than I drive, talk, or listen to the radio.
Code is the territory where I interfere with others, and this is where we may bother each other. Irresponsible coding is precisely how one of us can really disturb the other. So why don’t the police protect me against, say, authors of Apache Hadoop?
They created something that turns part of my life into a nightmare—much faster and much more severely than drunk drivers. So, where is the police? Why aren’t they protecting me, for my tax dollars? Why aren’t those Java guys in jail yet?
We need a law against irresponsible coding!
How about two months of imprisonment for a Singleton?
How would you punish programmers for bad coding practices (like global variables, for example):
— Yegor Bugayenko (@yegor256) April 5, 2020
