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Comment by lotyrin | Hacker News Reader

Organizations don't have access to an infinite pool of highly disciplined software engineers, the less discipline or skill required to get something done quickly and safely, the more things they can get done with more people and more kinds of people divided into teams with different responsibilities and different kinds of code.

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This is an important point. There was even a discussion here a few months back (I remembered it being more recent, but it was 4 months ago) on an article titled "Discipline Doesn't Scale" [0]. Discipline works up to a point, but the more your system relies on discipline, the more fragile it becomes as you scale (in people, in size of the system). At some point you'll hit a wall where your system is too big or you have too many people and discipline falters as a consequence, or you get slowed down maintaining discipline beyond what's reasonable for your field and customers.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24834965

I consider myself a highly disciplined software engineer, and I still want as many guard rails for myself as possible. I am a human, I make mistakes; my schema validator does not make mistakes.

The pool of people who understand any popular scripting language is incomparably larger than the pool of people who understand your clever dialect of YAML, JSON or XML.

With a schema, you have a fully-documented and soundly, statically typed DSL. If it were a Ruby library, you'd have to read the docs anyway, and you also lose static parsing and validation.

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