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Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

nytimes.com

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Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#21

Post by Terr_ »

artursapek wrote: post #16
liveoneggs wrote: post #3

(tangentially related to this article) I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it. The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies" before reaching the eighteen month mark. As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability vs maintainability whenever possi…

This is exactly why I roll my eyes when devs passionately argue in favor of "consistent code style" and spend hours of their lives manually linting their code. What's the point? It will be gone next year.

Did you tell the developers of 10 years ago that? I deal with their surviving shit daily, in mission-critical software, even. Gone in a year? Hah! I wish!

Not just naming conventions, or assignments in if-clauses, but files there the first indentation level is three spaces, and the rest are all four...

P.S.: And because it's that old, the change-history of a given line can be very important, so it's too late to mass-reformat everything. So you either make the file uglier by mixing "standards", or you have to hand-tweak all your changes to match.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#22

Post by wbl »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #8
maxxxxx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a lot of fake innovation happening these days. I bet if the programmers of the 70s had had the same amount of computing resources available as we have now they would have built great systems even with the tools available then. Other than the cloud and more computing and network power I don't think software development has really moved forward much.

> Other than the cloud and more computing and network power I don't think software development has really moved forward much. So a person from the 70s who was instantly transported to today would feel like the only difference is that instead of having our own servers we ship things to Heroku? Please...

Have you seen the Alto demos? Quake would be new to them, maybe the browser. As for shipping to Heroku IBM was renting mainframe timeshares in the 1960's.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#23

Post by alextheparrot »

artursapek wrote: post #16
liveoneggs wrote: post #3

(tangentially related to this article) I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it. The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies" before reaching the eighteen month mark. As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability vs maintainability whenever possi…

This is exactly why I roll my eyes when devs passionately argue in favor of "consistent code style" and spend hours of their lives manually linting their code. What's the point? It will be gone next year.

Manual linting is silly, but having a linter installed really saves a lot of pain. Git diffs should not include unrelated linting changes.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#24

Post by artursapek »

alextheparrot wrote: post #23
artursapek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I roll my eyes when devs passionately argue in favor of "consistent code style" and spend hours of their lives manually linting their code. What's the point? It will be gone next year.

Manual linting is silly, but having a linter installed really saves a lot of pain. Git diffs should not include unrelated linting changes.

Automated formatting like gofmt is great, and I'm a huge proponent of it. But code is so temporary that it makes no sense to spend man-hours making it look pretty.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#28

Post by akkartik »

liveoneggs wrote: post #3

(tangentially related to this article) I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it. The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies" before reaching the eighteen month mark. As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability vs maintainability whenever possi…

Totally with you. I've been thinking of it as rewrite-friendliness, and have some ideas for encouraging it: http://akkartik.name/about

Even if people don't believe that all code over five years old is doomed, writing code to be easy to rewrite still seems like a useful idea. You're preserving optionality, you're making it easier to try out multiple designs, and you'll have an easier time recruiting collaborators because they'll have more fun projects to try, and so they'll be more likely to progress 'down the funnel' from using a project to hacking on it to contributing it all the way to taking over its running.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#29

Post by mathattack »

liveoneggs wrote: post #3

(tangentially related to this article) I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it. The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies" before reaching the eighteen month mark. As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability vs maintainability whenever possi…

You haven't worked in a large company. :-) Much of the code behind your phone, the train system, chain restaurant ordering and any paper bill you get is likely 10+ years old. These companies undertake 5-year programs to replace ancient systems, and the 5-year programs frequently fail, and run late when they don't.

Re: Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance

#30

Post by santaclaus »

mathattack wrote: post #29
liveoneggs wrote: post #3

(tangentially related to this article) I have recently come to realize that, at least in my world, source code older than five years is basically doomed. Developers simply refuse to work on it. The code that makes it to five years is extraordinary as most of it "dies" before reaching the eighteen month mark. As a result I have recently been shifting my view to support replace-ability vs maintainability whenever possi…

You haven't worked in a large company. :-) Much of the code behind your phone, the train system, chain restaurant ordering and any paper bill you get is likely 10+ years old. These companies undertake 5-year programs to replace ancient systems, and the 5-year programs frequently fail, and run late when they don't.

Hell, look at the discovered/mdnsresponder disaster that happened with Apple a few OS releases back for a publically visible instance of this.
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