Edges in Software

One of my favorite sayings is “If you take care of the corners, the room takes care of itself.”

For the longest while I thought it was something that Frank Lloyd Wright had said but I haven’t been able to find an attribution. Regardless, I think that the idea is sound. The edge cases in our software define it. Ideally, we shouldn’t have many of them, but when we do they should be there by design. Software without edges is simpler and often more robust but there are tradeoffs. Let’s look at i...