Comment by z3t4
12 years ago
I think what happens with all intermediate or senior programmers is that we start to think about the best solution instead of just getting the job done.
Most code we write will either not be used or eventually rewritten anyways.
> Most code we write will either not be used or eventually rewritten anyways.
But it's like the advertsing paradox: we know most of our code will be discarded or rewritten, but we don't know which parts won't. And even worse, it is often the bad parts that survive because people become afraid to touch them.
We're screwing ourselves badly with that attitude in the long term. Because of similar attitudes in setting up industrial contro systems, you can now shut down an entire factory with a misplaced ICMP ping. Layers of hacks built on layers and layers of other hacks will bite us hard at some point, and I mean in the "lives lost" sense of biting.
I find that when working on large projects, the code does get rewritten... in a totally different location in the source tree... and we can never delete the old code.