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1. Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz)'s status on Monday, 10-Jun-2019 02:49:04 UTC Mike Gerwitz
   How I doom almost every personal project I start to work on: "Oh, I could generalize this."
   • Dr. Edward Morbius :o:, Antón and rgggn like this.
   • mangeurdenuage (mangeurdenuage)'s status on Monday, 10-Jun-2019 02:52:12 UTC mangeurdenuage

     in reply to
     What do you mean by this ?
   • Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz)'s status on Monday, 10-Jun-2019 03:21:51 UTC Mike Gerwitz

     in reply to

     • mangeurdenuage
     @mangeurdenuage Any solution to any problem can be viewed as a specific application of some more general principle, recursively. If you first write that more general program, and then write the program you were _going_ to write in terms of that general program, then it might be useful for a larger class of problems, and more interesting to write (...also recursively). And it may also take orders of magnitude longer to write, and require more research, and possibly never get written.
     
     As a professional, one learns to identify and avoid this problem, unless generalization is warranted (perhaps through incremental development). Yet at home, I fail to control myself. Which leads to a whole lot of interesting research, and a whole lot of incomplete projects.
   • Alexandre Oliva (lxoliva)'s status on Monday, 10-Jun-2019 07:46:53 UTC Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to
     reminded me of that classic xkcd on "passing the salt". sorry, no link handy
     Mike Gerwitz likes this.
   • mangeurdenuage (mangeurdenuage)'s status on Monday, 10-Jun-2019 16:39:40 UTC mangeurdenuage

     in reply to
     Thank you for the explanation :)