Comment by devin
9 hours ago
I can absolutely imagine this done in a bunch of different ways, and some of them would look like the scribblings of a child, and another approach could be really elegant. One approach may be built to extend, while the other just gets the job done. One approach may trade speed for readability, or vice versa.
Sure. Businesses often - more often than not! - initially write code that's less readable, less maintainable, less elegant etc. on the first, second, third, nth iteration. And then later, if it becomes an issue, they address any limitations that are actually affecting the business.
I'm actually a fan of code as art, but the average business system is not that. Elegance doesn't usually matter. Extensibility only matters if the product is such that extensibility is essential - in which case the business will probably figure that out after a few iterations, or fail in some way.
There are some kinds of software where all these properties might help it succeed, but again it's not typical business software. A banking or trading or healthcare management system is not going to be art.