Thread:BunsenH/@comment-35984727-20180714213128/@comment-24577221-20180715002924

It's possible to put things on top of the path tiles. That was a new feature that was added in version 2.1.8.

I was surprised that it took BBB so long to do it. To me, it looked lilke a thing that should have been possible as soon as the paths were created. Why would you have a path and not be able to put things on it? But I'm guessing that the problem was something like this: paths are a kind of decoration, like all of the others, and the original game design made it impossible to have two things on the same game location. In lots of places in the game code, it would check to make sure that the game never would do that. So all of those places would have to be changed, so that the game would never put two paths in the same place, or two non-path things in the same place, but it could have one each of the two kinds of things in the same place.

And if something like that wasn't built in from the start, then to try to change it later can take a lot of work and risk causing lots of new bugs.

I actually have two bugs that I'm supposed to be working on, at work, that are exactly like that. Years ago, back when the system was being designed, I was told to set it up so that it would have one of a certain kind of knob. I was told that it would only ever need one knob. I asked my bosses if they were absolutely sure about that? It wouldn't take much more work to set it up so it could have multiple knobs in the future, even if we only had one for now... but they insisted. "Keep it simple." I tried to argue (politely), but ultimately they told me to get on with it. So I did. And now, of course, they want to have multiple knobs after all.