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Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

addyosmani.com

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Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#181

Post by whstl »

atoav wrote: post #173
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #122

After almost 20 years of writing the best code I can muster as much as I can, I’ve come to understand that most people won’t ever really appreciate it for the effort you put in. Many won’t even notice; they’re too preoccupied with their own lives to open their eyes to what is there. Nor do they give a damn about mastery. But, that doesn’t mean it’s a waste. I don’t think I’d do much differently in retrospect, except…

I too have met many developers who have developed the mindset that good code is impossible. That is really sad. Imagine a carpenter that says straight cuts aren't possible, just because they never maintained their tools and the last 10 cuts came out wrong. Of course good code is possible. But not every person is going to write it and it is not going to happen under all possible circumstances and in all given project…

But what is "good code", even? For some people that's thousands of two-line methods in hundreds of classes where each part is easy to understand. For others it is more direct code that is optimized for debugging, but not as aesthetically pleasant. Very often those two groups people dislike each other's code a lot. And there's even more other "groups" than those obvious two.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#182

Post by agumonkey »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #122

After almost 20 years of writing the best code I can muster as much as I can, I’ve come to understand that most people won’t ever really appreciate it for the effort you put in. Many won’t even notice; they’re too preoccupied with their own lives to open their eyes to what is there. Nor do they give a damn about mastery. But, that doesn’t mean it’s a waste. I don’t think I’d do much differently in retrospect, except…

other colleagues not caring is one thing, your company not recognizing the value and giving you the adequate compensation is another.. I don't mind if colleagues don't appreciate as long as I don't have to either lower my skills or be underpaid

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#183

Post by quietbritishjim »

matjazmuhic wrote: post #177
atoav wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have met many developers who have developed the mindset that good code is impossible. That is really sad. Imagine a carpenter that says straight cuts aren't possible, just because they never maintained their tools and the last 10 cuts came out wrong. Of course good code is possible. But not every person is going to write it and it is not going to happen under all possible circumstances and in all given project…

Now imagine a carpenter who can build the most beautiful, elegant piece of furniture in 30 days, but you force them to make it in 10. Or you forbid them from using a certain tool. Or force them to use a tool you prefer. Or … Yes, not every programmer cares about good code. But of those that do, also not all of them can agree on what good code is. And not all good programmers can write good code, for one reason or ano…

> Now imagine a carpenter who can build the most beautiful, elegant piece of furniture in 30 days, but you force them to make it in 10. Or you forbid them from using a certain tool. Or force them to use a tool you prefer. Or …

Some of these are not like the others. Not allowing a carpenter to use the most suitable tools is petty. Not allowing them 30 days may make sense depending on the business context. What if it's a stool that's going to be sat on once and then thrown away? Or there's only 10 days salary in the bank but then an invester will see it and may pay for 100 days work?

Good code usually takes more time than bad code (depending on the reason!) and often it is worth that extra time (and the fight to get it). But sometimes it's better not to and that's OK.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#184

Post by stodor89 »

nouveaux wrote: post #85
ThalesX wrote: post #12

Sorry next developer, I'm on a tight deadline, used to love this craft, now I just do what the product people tell me to get a nice paycheck.

Sorry future me, I'm on a tight deadline. If I spent an extra two hours making this better now, you wouldn't have to spend two days fixing these problems. You're probably still on a tight deadline.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by." -- Douglas Adams

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#185

Post by deelly »

avg_dev wrote: post #84
imoverclocked wrote: post #57

As someone who has gone back and read my old code as well as a lot of others old code, there is no such thing as good code. IMHO, the problem is one of cultural context which is often not shared between generations of coders. Languages and best practices can change so violently that best-practices one decade are often anti-patterns in the next. As a codebase outlives its best-practices, do you stick with them and ext…

i don't agree with this take at all. good code solves the problem at hand. good code is as simple as possible. good code is testable and tested. good code is minimal. good code is performant. good code is maintainable. good code is understandable. yes it matters somewhat that you have some consistency of the way you code. that's a secondary thing

agree. good code is a code easy to read and easy to modify. thats all.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#186

Post by matjazmuhic »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #183
matjazmuhic wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine a carpenter who can build the most beautiful, elegant piece of furniture in 30 days, but you force them to make it in 10. Or you forbid them from using a certain tool. Or force them to use a tool you prefer. Or … Yes, not every programmer cares about good code. But of those that do, also not all of them can agree on what good code is. And not all good programmers can write good code, for one reason or ano…

> Now imagine a carpenter who can build the most beautiful, elegant piece of furniture in 30 days, but you force them to make it in 10. Or you forbid them from using a certain tool. Or force them to use a tool you prefer. Or … Some of these are not like the others. Not allowing a carpenter to use the most suitable tools is petty. Not allowing them 30 days may make sense depending on the business context. What if it's…

Completely agree.

It’s all about trade-offs. Which many developers don’t - or just refuse to - understand.

My point was that without some context this kind of conversations - about good and bad code and good and bad coders - are not very useful.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#187

Post by matjazmuhic »

atoav wrote: post #172
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #122

After almost 20 years of writing the best code I can muster as much as I can, I’ve come to understand that most people won’t ever really appreciate it for the effort you put in. Many won’t even notice; they’re too preoccupied with their own lives to open their eyes to what is there. Nor do they give a damn about mastery. But, that doesn’t mean it’s a waste. I don’t think I’d do much differently in retrospect, except…

I too have met many developers who have developed the mindset that good code is impossible. That is really sad. Imagine a carpenter that says straight cuts aren't possible, just because they never maintained their tools and the last 10 cuts came out wrong. Of course good code is possible. But not every person is going to write it and it is not going to happen under all possible circumstances and in all given project…

Seems like a duplicate to which my reply is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36811381#36811433

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#188

Post by [deleted] »

Gigachad wrote: post #126
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #122

After almost 20 years of writing the best code I can muster as much as I can, I’ve come to understand that most people won’t ever really appreciate it for the effort you put in. Many won’t even notice; they’re too preoccupied with their own lives to open their eyes to what is there. Nor do they give a damn about mastery. But, that doesn’t mean it’s a waste. I don’t think I’d do much differently in retrospect, except…

Usually the situation is someone has meticulously crafted some perfect system which can be extended and reused in many coherent ways. And then that person leaves the company and no one else truly understands how it works or was meant to be used so it gets a series of hacks and patches applied to it which violate the original design which is known by no one at the company. For most projects this is not that big of a d…

[deleted]

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#189

Post by kaba0 »

spondyl wrote: post #132
Gigachad wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the situation is someone has meticulously crafted some perfect system which can be extended and reused in many coherent ways. And then that person leaves the company and no one else truly understands how it works or was meant to be used so it gets a series of hacks and patches applied to it which violate the original design which is known by no one at the company. For most projects this is not that big of a d…

For anyone interested in a discussion about the concept of systems not being understood by newcomers, I can recommend Peter Naur's Programming as Theory Building: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Just commented the exact same thing without checking if someone else also posted, because it is not that well known for some reason.

Re: Good code is like a love letter to the next developer who will maintain it

#190

Post by kaba0 »

whstl wrote: post #176
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A semantically weak language does not reduce the inherent complexity of a system, as problem complexity is constant. What Go does is encode solution complexity implicitly throughout a code base. This is the same effect JavaScript often has.

Go isn't my favourite language, but I disagree with that: a language being being simple does wonders to reduce the possibilities of accidental complexity added by complicated features that are unnecessary for the business. But of course it's still possible to make a mess: I've seen someone who created an ad-hoc object model (with its own structs, plus multiple inheritance and all) on top of Golang and wrote a few app…

Then why not assembly is the ideal program language? Ad absurdum, that’s the simplest, isn’t it? Each line does something completely trivial.

Abstraction is the only tool we have to even hope to manage complexity. Unfortunately there is no way to force good abstractions, finding out the perfect abstraction is the deal of the art. Maybe I’m wrong on this, but I’m on the elitist view that the industry really shouldn’t try to replace a single senior developer with 10 juniors that monkey patch based on stackoverflow/chatgpt. I don’t even see how that makes financial sense, if one values product quality.

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