How can I say strongly enough that this subtle point strikes directly at my gut feeling about clean design? If you are trying to overload a design or make it magic then it is trying to do too much and needs to be rethought!

It may take some attention and focus to see what Randal is talking about here, but the point came up several times in the Re (tilly) 1: Supersplit thread. Basically making things magic makes them more complex to implement and harder to learn. Remember that the most complex bugs to track down are at your interfaces and think twice before making those interfaces needlessly difficult to figure out.

Sometimes it is worth breaking this rule, but (like most rules) not without specific good reason.

In reply to Re (tilly) 4: ref, no, maybe? by tilly
in thread ref, no, maybe? by Ovid

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.