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Throw away your first draft of your code

ntietz.com

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Re: Throw away your first draft of your code

#51

Post by refactor_master »

avgDev wrote: post #37

I rewrote a mission critical application. The original app was something else. One function had 1500+ lines of code. It was the ugliest thing I have seen in my life. We wrote cleaner code in early college years. However, that code ran the business for 12 years with almost 0 modifications. People created work around for some stuff. Error handling was poor. But the goal was achieved and business continued to grow. I th…

> However, that code ran the business for 12 years with almost 0 modifications

We have code like that, and it requires everything around it to twist and contort to comply with the beast of unmaintainable at the center of it all, simply because at this point it has so poor test coverage and is so incredibly mission critical now.

Re: Throw away your first draft of your code

#52

Post by EdSharkey »

The psychology of knowing ahead of time you'll delete all the code is interesting. Devs would be in hack-hack-hack mode and not worry about design - the goal is just explore all the territory to find the hilly parts and landmines. Move as quickly as possible and report back.

In general I think developers value their code too much and should be willing to scrap and rewrite, especially whenever requirements are changing. I chalk it up to everyone's desire to conserve mental energies due to not understanding what their energy peak/limits are.

Re: Throw away your first draft of your code

#53

Post by robaato »

kleiba wrote: post #10

The temptation to throw away all of your code - be it a prototype or a "grown" code base - arises often. Often it is a bad idea. I get it, though, there is an inherent attractiveness in the idea of starting fresh from a clean slate. Except, more likely than not, you'll soon find yourself in a similar situation to the one you started from. The fundamental problem is that it is easy to underestimate the edge cases. Sur…

Rather than "throw away" I would "start from scratch" meaning I can refer to prototype but reimplement with respect to appropriate norms. As a version control fanatic, very little gets really thrown away in my book. Just hidden.

Re: Throw away your first draft of your code

#55

Post by hot_gril »

davidkunz wrote: post #21

I like to build my first version in one file with as few abstractions as possible. No helper functions, unless absolutely necessary, just straight-forward code. Building good abstractions later on is a lot easier than starting with wrong ones in the first place.

This is an underrated way of doing things that I've come to appreciate over time. Heck, I'll even go live with the all-in-one-file thing until there's a reason to split it up. It's all peanuts anyway compared to bigger decisions like what API, DBMS, DB schema, other deps, libs, etc you use.

Re: Throw away your first draft of your code

#56

Post by gjvc »

jstarfish wrote: post #28
shortcake27 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, this is what actually happens. A developer makes a low-quality, low-effort prototype under the assumption it won’t ship. Someone sees it. It gets shipped. Everyone loses.

Sabotage your prototypes then. Have it reset its state every 5 minutes or deliberately leak memory.

Sneaky move.... but then, in the eyes of some people, you might well appear not competent to put together a working system, so make sure you know your audience.

Re: Throw away your first draft of your code

#57

Post by tnecniv »

robaato wrote: post #53
kleiba wrote: post #10

The temptation to throw away all of your code - be it a prototype or a "grown" code base - arises often. Often it is a bad idea. I get it, though, there is an inherent attractiveness in the idea of starting fresh from a clean slate. Except, more likely than not, you'll soon find yourself in a similar situation to the one you started from. The fundamental problem is that it is easy to underestimate the edge cases. Sur…

Rather than "throw away" I would "start from scratch" meaning I can refer to prototype but reimplement with respect to appropriate norms. As a version control fanatic, very little gets really thrown away in my book. Just hidden.

Yeah normally when I do this, it’s because I picked bad abstractions. The main business logic I can bring over almost line by line, but I want to reshape the abstractions / data structures / interface to that logic

Re: Throw away your first draft of your code

#58

Post by trentnix »

kleiba wrote: post #10

The temptation to throw away all of your code - be it a prototype or a "grown" code base - arises often. Often it is a bad idea. I get it, though, there is an inherent attractiveness in the idea of starting fresh from a clean slate. Except, more likely than not, you'll soon find yourself in a similar situation to the one you started from. The fundamental problem is that it is easy to underestimate the edge cases. Sur…

Ah yes, starting from a clean slate.

https://devrant.com/rants/816880/i-ve-done-it-again

Re: Throw away your first draft of your code

#60

Post by superb_dev »

davidkunz wrote: post #21

I like to build my first version in one file with as few abstractions as possible. No helper functions, unless absolutely necessary, just straight-forward code. Building good abstractions later on is a lot easier than starting with wrong ones in the first place.

I'm gonna second this. Just build it first and add the abstractions as they become obvious
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