← Back to context

Comment by ljm

5 years ago

I think it's more that clean code doesn't exist because there's no objective measure of this (and those services that claim there are are just as dangerous as Clean Code, the book); anyone can come along and find something about the code that could be tidied up. And legacy is legacy, it's a different problem space to the one a greenfield project exists in.

> As a person that has to maintain dirty code

This is a strange credential to present and then use as a basis to be offended. Are you saying that you have dirty code and have to keep it dirty?

9 comments

ljm

Reply
29athrowaway  5 years ago

The counterintuitive aspect of this problem that acts as a trap of the less pragmatic people, is that an objective measure is not always necessary.

Let's say you are a feeding a dog. You can estimate what amount of food is dog too little, and what amount of dog food is too much... but now, some jerk comes around and tells you they're going to feed the dog the next time. You agree.

You check the plate, and there's very little food in it. So you say: "hey, you should add more dog food".

Then, the jerk reacts by putting an excessive amount of food in it, just to fuck with you. Then you say "that's too much food!"... So then the jerk reacts saying "you should tell me exactly how many dog pellets I should put on the plate".

Have you ever had to count dog pellets individually to feed a dog? no. You haven't, you have never done it, yet you have fed dogs for years without problems just using a good enough estimate of how much a dog can eat.

Just to please the fucking jerk, you take the approximate amount dog food you regularly feed the dog every day, count the pellets, and say: "there, you fuck, 153 dog pellets".

But the jerk is not happy yet. Just to really fuck with you, the guy will challenge you and say: "so what happens if I feed the dog 152 pellets, or 154... see? you are full of shit". Then you have to explain the jerk that 153 was never important, what's important is the approximate amount of dog food. But the jerk doesn't think that way, the jerk wants a fucking exact number so they can keep fighting you...

Then the jerk will probably say that a dog pellet is not a proper unit of mass, and then the jerk will say that nutrients are not equally distributed in dog pellets, and the bullshit will go on and on and on.

And if you are ever done discussing the optimal number of pellets then there will be another discussion about the frequency in which you feed the dog, and you will probably end up talking about spacetime and atomic clocks and the NTP protocol and relativity and inertial frames just to please the jerk whose objective is just to waste your time until you give up trying to enforce good practices.

And this is how the anti-maintainability jerks operate, by getting into endless debates about how an objective measure of things is required, when in reality, it's not fucking needed and it never was. Estimation is fine.

Just like you won't feed a dog a fucking barrel of dog food you won't create a function that is 5 thousand lines of code long because it's equally nonsensical.

So in the end, what do you do? you say: this many lines of code in a function is too fucking much, don't write functions this long. Why? because I say so, end of debate, fuck it.

There's a formal concept for this in philosophy, but that's up to you to figure out.

  • mattgreenrocks  5 years ago

    This is why I never talk software architecture with anyone on the internet anymore. It’s always an intellectual race to the bottom with someone who insists on a rigid process for things that are absolutely obvious to anyone with experience and genuine concern for the state of the codebase.

  • Chris2048  5 years ago

    Another way to say (I think) the same is:

    The cost of analysis outweighs the benefit.

    In this case the cost of counting food pellets versus the benefit of precision; but in software generally it is the high cost of (accurate) estimating versus the benefit of just getting on with it.

    It is also, to some degree, the impossibility of estimating given that the task is given to someone who is an expert at writing code, not estimating. Coding expertise give insight into how long coding tasks take, but that it the least critical component of estimating a task. Writing code and seeing if it works is the best estimate; sometimes the prototype works first time, never always.

    best example of this: https://xkcd.com/1445/

  • ljm  5 years ago

    > Just to please the fucking jerk

    That's probably mistake number one right there.

    There's another formal concept for this in philosophy, related to wrestling with pigs.