On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 7:13 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by dowdle
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

> "rather than papering over problems, or adding yet another layer-of-fix on top of an underlying problem... he/they will do their best to fix things that are broken rather than allowing them to continue to be broken"

Some days I wish there were more of these kinds of people. At one point I read an article (which I can no longer find) which coined a term "broken API syndrome" or "fixed interface syndrome" or something like that.

Basically, there are situations where you're coding against an API which doesn't quite support one feature you need. And instead of looking behind the API (which you can because it's open source) and making a small fix/change there, you end up writing chunks of horrible fragile code on top of the API just to make it work.

This happens even in projects where both sides of the API are in the same repository. It drives me nuts sometimes.

I have great respect for people who get in there and fix broken APIs, even though they are rendering large chunks of other people's work obsolete. The world in the long run is better off.

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