would that be a £300Bn mistake or a £500Bn software mistake?

Discussed here: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5U3SEW6A/p1588433913149100

Sounds like Carmack is defending Neil Ferguson? Makes sense to me. Much of programming 'best practice' stinks of superstition.

Something like 5% of my job is maintaining a system that has a 12000 line java class (and it would be bigger if the author consistently formatted if statements with braces 🙄). It saves customers a tremendous amount of money (potentially hundreds of millions, though I don’t know an exact estimate--could be a nice feature to make it easier to see that). I hate the code a lot of the time, it’s absurd how it’s written. But the fact that I can spend only 5% of my time on this system is a testament that it just works.

Yeah I’m with Carmack on that one.. there’s definitely a tendency to overvalue superficial code qualities and undervalue the code’s history, how many real-world demands has it survived

This response to @Konrad Hinsen's article seems interesting: https://lobste.rs/s/zu8u8i/open_letter_software_engineers#c_9lj2yn

Interesting indeed, thanks for relaying! I agree in fact that there are more claims that deserve disclaimers. But for me, disclaimers matter in proportion to (1) the advertising effort behind the initial claim and (2) the knowledge gradient between writer and reader. That’s why “C++ for dummies” without a disclaimer is so problematic.