There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

Re:There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code by gefhfffh on Friday January 28, 2022 @06:56AM (#30113547)

No, it is not cheap, generally.

Example:

Dendrite[0] was going to be a Rewrite of Synapse (which was a prototype which ended up going into production). The rewrite started more than 5 years ago, had lots of development breaks and it still is nowhere complete or close to replace a existing Synapse instance (which even today is ... Well ... suboptimal software).

The current plans are to support and use both servers long term, because Synapse is already too widespread.

I wouldn't call that cheap.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite

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Re:There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code by skohan on Friday January 28, 2022 @08:29AM (#30114293)

Well starting from scratch for a rewrite is generally a bad idea. I'm more a fan of incremental re-wrties. But I have code bases I have been working on for years with tens of thousands of lines where basically the entire thing gets rewritten ever 18 months or so, a bit at a time.

Isn't your example proof of the benefit of pragmatic coding? Synapse is actually serving users right now. Dendrite sounds like a "better design" which is stuck in purgatory.

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Re:There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code by gefhfffh on Friday January 28, 2022 @11:54AM (#30117228)

They tried an incremental rewrite before. They failed, and started Dendrite.

https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta

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Re:There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code by MrPatan on Sunday January 30, 2022 @05:56AM (#30135785)

Survivor bias.

You don't see all the perfectly designed codebases that never went anywhere.

We only talk about legacy code because it's the one that pays the bills.

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