Re:There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code
by hinkley on Friday January 28, 2022 @10:43AM
(#30116009)
I still care, but the things I fret about have shifted substantially.
There are many categories of code problem that you don’t have to get right the first time. Some things can grow organically. But there are combinations that can be extremely resistant to change.
In particular, shared state is both state and coupling. Global shared state is a fucking nightmare, and almost made me quit my current job a couple months in.
I thought I could fix it, but I underestimated the number of hands in the code, and the longevity of the alliances I could make to get it done. The thing with a hideous mess is that the people who don’t mind it stick around, and they probably made it in the first place. Mostly what’s kept me here is the pandemic, and he fact that a lot of my energy is now in a hobby, not invested in my job. The tiebreaker was that some self-aware wolves have found slightly better code patterns and I have been exploiting that all I can. Write more like that, delete code like this ASAP. We have spent much of the last 18 months working on things I identified in my first six weeks. Not always in the most healthy way, but at least some people are looking at it.
There are many categories of code problem that you don’t have to get right the first time. Some things can grow organically. But there are combinations that can be extremely resistant to change.
In particular, shared state is both state and coupling. Global shared state is a fucking nightmare, and almost made me quit my current job a couple months in.
I thought I could fix it, but I underestimated the number of hands in the code, and the longevity of the alliances I could make to get it done. The thing with a hideous mess is that the people who don’t mind it stick around, and they probably made it in the first place. Mostly what’s kept me here is the pandemic, and he fact that a lot of my energy is now in a hobby, not invested in my job. The tiebreaker was that some self-aware wolves have found slightly better code patterns and I have been exploiting that all I can. Write more like that, delete code like this ASAP. We have spent much of the last 18 months working on things I identified in my first six weeks. Not always in the most healthy way, but at least some people are looking at it.