← Back to context

Comment by pmarreck

4 hours ago

We're going to use your preferred development method of TDD red-green and go at this with full belt-and-suspenders; first the belt:

God that belt and suspenders thing gives me a visceral physical reaction. Nauseating.

  • Yet it's so much better than the abhorrent "code smell" term that somehow stuck in the industry.

    • I was probably there when they invented that term, LOL (I first heard it in the Ruby startup space years ago, I think). I still think it's meaningful, along with "design smell". Why? Because it speaks to coding as craft, not just as purely-rational engineering. The design of things matters, and yet, design is (mostly) "irrational"... just like smells.

      It shoots itself in the foot, though- Smells don't really have a real consequence*; bad design does.

      * actually, I just thought of one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_compl...