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“Good Taste” Is Just Experience
(terriblesoftware.org)
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this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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Programming
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The biggest problem with this atleast for me is that I see people with decades of experience who still have awful taste.
They ran into an issue, learned either nothing Or the wrong thing from it and moved on.
Yeah it's clearly more than just experience. It's at least experience + actually learning + actually caring. I wouldn't rule out natural talent either, though I have seen plenty of smart people with poor programming taste.
For example I worked on a C++ SDK where the guy that wrote it was clearly very smart... But he had also written an enormous god object using CRTP to inherit about 20 classes. The aim was to make it somehow modular, but it absolutely wasn't. Clearly poor taste.
Maybe it's like religion. There are plenty of very smart people that believe in an imaginary friend. It's almost orthogonal to "smartness". Maybe taste is the same.