Comment by fooker
4 hours ago
I disagree, most code is not worth improving.
I would rather make N bad prototypes to understand the feasibility of solving N problems than trying to write beautiful code for one misguided problem which may turn out to be a dead end.
There are a few orders of magnitude more problems worth solving than you can write good code for. Your time is your most important resource, writing needlessly robust code, checking for situations that your prototype will never encounter, just wastes time when it gets thrown away.
A good analogy for this is how we built bridges in the Roman empire, versus how we do it now.
Have you ever been frustrated with software before? Has a computer program ever wasted your time by being buggy, obviously too slow or otherwise too resource intensive, having a poorly thought out interface, etc?
Yes. I am, however, not willing to spend money to get it fixed.
From the other side, the vast majority of customers will happily take the cheap/free/ad-supported buggy software. This is why we have all these random Google apps, for example.
Take a look at the bug tracker of any large open source codebase, there will be a few tens of thousands of reported bugs. It is worse for closed corporate codebases. The economics to write good code or to get bugs fixed does not make sense until you have a paying customer complain loudly.