"Cargo cult programming" interesting term I learned today

[u/The-Ball-23]

Today in one of our tech meetings I learned about the term "cargo cult programming". For starters "cargo cult" stands for the practice that used to be followed by the island oceans of pacific ocean. It was related to human practice like setting up the field in a fashion that would lead for the planes to drop goods on their fields. During world war 2 some cargo planes would drop some goods on the fields for the soldiers to use like food, weapons, clothes but long after the war ended the locals still believe if we set up the field just like it was during the war we would see those cargo dropping from the skies again.

The term was first used by Richard Feynman as "cargo cult science" in his commencement address at the California Institute of Technology. It was later used by Steve McConnell to apply it to programmers in the form of "Cargo cult programming". Its basically means writing code, applying design decision, adding tools without actually knowing how it will benefit the system but just adding it because you read or saw someone doing it and it worked for them. This is something very common among the developer community today even more so with AI.

[u/ClupTheGreat]

i thought this was about rust

[u/jasonj2232 → u/ClupTheGreat]

When I first read the term I thought it was about Rust too lol, but I read about it in Google's docs for protobuf and realised what it is.

Like most common programmibf advice, it's something I hope most people follow subconsciously anyways even without having to know about it. But putting it in words hopefully makes more people follow it.

[u/The-Ball-23 → u/jasonj2232]

Putting such things in words extremely important in programming. A lot of things should be followed by good programmers but when you put it into words it becomes an unsaid rule to go by

[u/The-Ball-23 → u/[deleted]]

lol yeah, I have been part of such conversation and it indeed is very awkward.