Often the worst code comes from prolific people. There’s just so much if it. And if you touch it you will break it at least 1% of the time, so you have to pick your battles when you are trying to keep the ratio under control.
For everyone else this is tautological. Good code can continue to be good code.
People who only have green field projects as their context are very frustrating in conversations like this. They make suggestions like, well, don’t fuck up in the first place. I don’t know what your history is but that’s the feeling I’m getting.
I could assume you're throwing shade on "prolific programmers" out of some sense of insecurity, but it wouldn't be fair to generalize about strangers on the internet ;)
I just punch up at condescending people. Every discipline has a bunch of armchair people who don’t understand the problem who think “get more exercise” is the response to depressed people or people with chronic fatigue, “eat fewer calories” is the answer to weight issues or diabetes, or “write it right the first time” is a useful response to people trying to solve real world problems.
Kindly let the grownups talk and keep your flash card answers to yourself.
Well one of us is certainly being condescending ;)
And did you really answer twice to the same comment? My goodness I must have really struck a nerve.
Code has a lot of really great properties which make it easy to modify in provably safe ways if you know what you're doing.
My definition of "good-quality" code is pretty much exactly "how difficult would this codebase be for a new engineer to understand and modify safely."