In my project there has been this guy who produced more lines of code than most other. All of his code is a terribly convoluted mess no one can work with. Also buggy and slow as hell. It’s been many years since he left the company, and the negative effects are still seen today.
Luckily we’ve been able to detach ourselves from the worst parts.
It reminds me of the quote, “if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter”. Terse code is often better, because it is often developed using a process that only adds necessary things or was created by trial and error during the development process that isn’t included in the final output.
Lengthy code is often written because a person coded their misunderstandings, their ambiguities about the problem space, and their early failures at solving the problem into the code.
In my project there has been this guy who produced more lines of code than most other. All of his code is a terribly convoluted mess no one can work with. Also buggy and slow as hell. It’s been many years since he left the company, and the negative effects are still seen today.
Luckily we’ve been able to detach ourselves from the worst parts.
It reminds me of the quote, “if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter”. Terse code is often better, because it is often developed using a process that only adds necessary things or was created by trial and error during the development process that isn’t included in the final output.
Lengthy code is often written because a person coded their misunderstandings, their ambiguities about the problem space, and their early failures at solving the problem into the code.
True. However, in this case I believe this guy just had a weird admiration for complexity.