For the purposes of my reply to the author, the type of fix doesn't matter and its discussion would be a distraction away from my main point: the blog author Curtis "Ovid" Poe misintepreted the comment by Samuel Falvo II and therefore wrote the wrong "solution" as a response. Ovid's health data example of obj.fetchDataFromServer() error and reconstructing data from other sources with a threshold score is not the same abstraction level as the commenter's example of obj.last_name getting broken because the plumbing API was renamed/refactored.
(My guess is that Samuel Falvo II's hostile tone makes it easy to miss that he was actually describing a syntax error and not a data interpretation error.)
Regardless of whether the fix is:
- stringsplit(full_name) to extract a last_name
- or change the client code's usage of last_name and only use full_name
- or re-architect the upstream customer object to include both last_name and full_name so there's a gradual migration
...it isn't the issue.
What the angry commenter was trying to communicate was, "tell me about the last_name refactoring causing a syntax error _immediately_ instead of letting it sit there as a ticking time bomb that will blow up and wake me up at 4am".
He doesn't necessarily have to immediately fix it, but he does want to immediately know of the error's existence before a crash at runtime.
