A Philosophy of Software Design

by John Ousterhout

Don’t change existing conventions. Resist the urge to “improve” on existing conventions. Having a “better idea” is not a sufficient excuse to introduce inconsistencies. Your new idea may indeed be better, but the value of consistency over inconsistency is almost always greater than the value of one approach over another. Before introducing inconsistent behavior, ask yourself two questions. First, do you have significant new information justifying your approach that wasn’t available when the old convention was established? Second, is the new approach so much better that it is worth taking the time to update all of the old uses? If your organization agrees that the answers to both questions are “yes,” then go ahead and make the upgrade; when you are done, there should be no sign of the old convention. However, you still run the risk that other developers will not know about the new convention, so they may reintroduce the old approach in the future. Overall, reconsidering established conventions is rarely a good use of developer time.

Consistency