“kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings”

Stephen King

Is there a programmer equivalent to the phrase ‘kill your darlings’?

In writing this phrase refers to the need for an author to cut parts of a piece that they have absolutely fallen in love with if they detract from the piece overall. It’s necessary to constantly remind ourselves of this need because when we write we come to love parts of the work for reasons completely apart from their quality, and to enjoy them for reasons that will be completely lost on any subsequent reader. Parts like this need to die, because the point of our writing isn’t to amuse our selves (well, most of the time), but to communicate something to our readers.

Do we need an equivalent phrase for programming? Either way, the idea certainly apples. We can sink a lot of time and effort into ideas that turn it to be detrimental to the goals of the application, no better than a simpler idea, or even the way we were doing it to begin with. Ideas that do nothing to improve our program, but that merely allow us the pride of a particularly clever solution, or the chance to use a ‘cool’ technology. But we can’t let ego, the sunk cost fallacy, or anything else distract us from the fact that these darlings need to die.

And yeah, I wrote this mostly to remind myself.