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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

Giving in a bad system is more pragmatic rather than good

Careful what you wish for. These days one has to be thankful if a badly designed old system isn't replaced with a new system that's even worse despite the best intentions ;)

Kinda reminds me of a quote attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup:

"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses"

I feel there are no absolutely "good" systems, only the ones with added compromises over time. Battle scars on a beautiful body.

No, it is about doing what you can, with what you have, where you are. That is good.

Since you can do both (you're reading a post about a RE-write) your 1-dimensional framework doesn't help deciding what is good

If you believe everything around you must be good before you can do good, then you must trick yourself into believing imperfect things are good to do anything, or withdraw completely from the world. Your radical philosophy leads either to delusion or isolation and inaction. Just do what you can.

The two terms aren’t mutually exclusive

Only in a dictionary. In a sentence that has the context of a poorly designed system, they are because you explicitly have to do worse programming to meet the system at a worse point

“Good” and “bad” are subjective.

Being pragmatic about the design of an ecosystem and working with it, could be seen as good programming vs the alternative of fighting that ecosystem and thus creating entirely new classes of bugs.

And this was what the GP was responding to. They were was that the pragmatism of working with that ecosystem showed good judgement.

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