Comment by breuleux
2 months ago
As someone who does that a lot... I agree. Self-indulgent is the word. It just feels great when the implementation is a perfect fit for your brain, but sometimes that's just not a good use of your time.
Sometimes, you strike gold, so there's that.
I kind of struggle with this. I basically hate everyone elses code, and by that I mean I hate most people's code. A lot of people write awesome code but most people write what I'd call trash code.
And I do think there's more to it than preference. Like there's actual bugs in the code, it's confusing and because it's confusing there's more bugs. It's solving a simple problem but doing so in an unnecessarily convoluted way. I can solve the same problem in a much simpler way. But because everything is like this I can't just fix it, there's layers and layers of this convolution that can't just be fixed and of course there's no proper decoupling etc so a refactor is kind of all or nothing. If you start it's like pulling on a thread and everything just unravels.
This is going to sound pompous and terrible but honestly some times I feel like I'm too much better than other developers. I have a hard time collaborating because the only thing I really want to do with other people's code is delete it and rewrite it. I can't fix it because it isn't fixable, it's just trash. I wish they would have talked to me before writing it, I could have helped then.
Obviously in order to function in a professional environment i have to suppress this stuff and just let the code be ass but it really irks me. Especially if I need to build on something someone else made - itsalmost always ass, I don't want to build on a crooked foundation. I want to fix the foundation so the rest of the building can be good too. But there's no time and it's exhausting fixing everyone else's messes all the time.
I can guarantee you that if you were to write a completely new program and continued to work on it for more than 5 years, you'd feel the same things about your own code eventually. It's just unavoidable at some point. The only thing left then is degrees badness. And nothing is more humbling than realizing that the only person that got you there is yourself.
No, I wouldn't. I have been working for years on the same codebase, it's not that hard to keep it clean and simple. I just refactor/redesign when necessary instead of adding hacky workarounds on top of hacky workarounds for years until the codebase is nothing but a collection of workarounds.
And most importantly I just design it well from the start, it's not that hard to do. At least for me.
Of course we all make mistake, there's bugs in my code too. I have made choices I regret. But not on the level that I'm talking about.
I can guarantee you that I have been doing just that for 20 years, creating and working on the same codebase, and that it only got better with time (cleaner code and more robust execution), though more complex because the domain itself did. We would have been stuck in the accidental complexity of messy hacks and their buggy side effects if we had not continuously adapted and improved things.
I feel this too. And it seems like the very worst code always seems to come from the people that seem the smartest, otherwise. I've worked for a couple of people that are either ACM alum and/or have their own wikipedia page, multiple patents to their name and leaders in business, and beyond anyone else that I have ever worked with, their code has been the worst.
Which is part of what I find so motivating with AI. It is much better at making sense of that muck, and with some guidance it can churn out code very quickly with a high degree of readability.
did you ever consider their code was good and it's you that is the problem?
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Yeah, I know this feeling very well.
I usually attribute it to people being lazy, not caring, or not using their brain.
It's quite frustrating when something is *so obviously* wrong, to the point that anyone with a modicum of experience should be able to realize that what was implemented is totally whack. Please, spend at least a few minutes reviewing your work so that I don't have to waste my time on nonsense.
I’ve linked this before, but I feel like this might resonate with you: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
I enjoyed that but honestly it kind of doesn't really resonate. Because it's like "This stuff is really complicated and nobody knows how anything works etc and that's why everything is shit".
I'm talking about simple stuff that people just can't do right. Not complex stuff. Like imagine some perfect little example code on the react docs or whatever, good code. Exemplary code. Trivial code that does a simple little thing. Now imagine some idiot wrote code to do exactly the same thing but made it 8 times longer and incredibly convoluted for absolutely no reason and that's basically what most "developers" do. Everyone's a bunch of stupid amateurs who can't do simple stuff right, that's my problem. It's not understandable, it's not justifiable, it's not trading off quality for speed. It's stupidity, ignorance and lazyness.
That's why we have coding interviews that are basically "write fizzbuzz while we watch" and when I solve their trivial task easily everyone acts like I'm Jesus because most of my peers can't fucking code. Like literally I have colleagues with years of experience who are barely at a first year CS level. They don't know the basics of the language they've been working with for years. They're amateurs.
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Yeah a bridge has a plan that it’s built and verified against. It’s the picture book waterfall implementation. The software industry has moved away from this approach because software is not like bridges.
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