I've seen too many places where reasoning similar to that of 2 results in developers prematurely punting to quick and dirty hacks to get a trouble ticket closed faster. It may not be possible to get by with anything but a one-off conditional, especially in tax calculation , but I worry about the claim that it is inevitable. It provides a justification to not look for more maintainable alternatives first.
The same thing with 4. The only thing that bothers me is the sense of inevitablility. There are places where specific cases need to be dealt with in code, and it is an entirely different argument of how they should be dealt with once that much is assumed. But the inevitability bothers me, if only because I have run into several cases where things were claimed inevitable, and upon closer inspection caused large amounts of pain that could have been avoided if the existence of alternatives was considered.
You're right - especially about 4 - but the absoluteness is in practice: your solutions to 2 and 4 require a critical mass of people to understand the data being modelled (and thus - or perhaps the other way around - the processes creating/manipulating the data) and this is so rare as to be effectively non-existent.
I've seen too many places where reasoning similar to that of 2 results in developers prematurely punting to quick and dirty hacks to get a trouble ticket closed faster. It may not be possible to get by with anything but a one-off conditional, especially in tax calculation , but I worry about the claim that it is inevitable. It provides a justification to not look for more maintainable alternatives first.
The same thing with 4. The only thing that bothers me is the sense of inevitablility. There are places where specific cases need to be dealt with in code, and it is an entirely different argument of how they should be dealt with once that much is assumed. But the inevitability bothers me, if only because I have run into several cases where things were claimed inevitable, and upon closer inspection caused large amounts of pain that could have been avoided if the existence of alternatives was considered.