It’s a slippery slope. Doing something just because you can doesn’t ever justify doing it. But the reverse is sometimes true. Not being able to do something often gets wrongly turned into “that is simply unnecessary.” This is something I want to check in myself, perhaps sometimes I am lying to myself, that something should, in fact, be done and is the best way, but that my not knowing it might be causing me to delude myself into thinking it actually isn’t needed.
This is often easier to spot in others that in ourselves. Recently, I’ve
been hearing it a lot with regard to improvements to shell scripts.
Usually it involves stuff that I could catch and fix in less than one
minute with shellcheck and other stuff that I just know about
parameter expansion that others have no idea how to do. I get comments
like, “you know this is just a little script, right?” and “well this
isn’t something we need to focus on” but what it might actually mean is
that the amount of time it would take them to do it wouldn’t warrant
it. But I’m so used to doing those particular things that they are
literally seconds of difference to do them right.
The same goes for using git correctly. I’ve got git and gh down so
well now (compared to two months ago) that tagging and commenting and
opening issues and such take me less than 10 seconds on average
(depending on how much text is involved.)
Another one that my ex-wife used to hit me with was, “how do you have so much time to write all that” thinking that I spent much more time on my writing than I do. I just do it all the time and I’m a pretty fast typist so I can type (usually) as fast as I think, something that gets me into trouble all the time as well because I don’t think before I type responses a lot of times and really should have thought about it before hitting “Send.”