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Nobody cares about your clean code

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Re: Nobody cares about your clean code

#41

Post by PurpleFoxy »

atum47 wrote: post #31

I really don't get all the hate towards php, I'm about to put my old blog online and it's written in php. It's a cool language.

It’s because it makes no effort to prevent people doing insanely insecure things. Rails has a lot of safeguards for insecure things like using user input to update a record.

PHP won’t even fix bugs due to backwards compatibility. They worked out their sql string escape function didn’t escape properly but instead of fixing it and telling everyone to check their code, they duplicated the function and prefixed the name with “real_”.

Re: Nobody cares about your clean code

#42

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

If you are a single developer, sure, knock yourself out, and stick everything in a single file.

If you actually ever plan on ever having other developers contribute to and maintain your code, or god forbid multiple teams of developers, you better have things structured in a way that they can understand.

Re: Nobody cares about your clean code

#43

Post by Xunjin »

notacoward wrote: post #10

John F. Woods (who I actually knew IRL briefly - nicer guy than his online reputation suggests) said it best. "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." I'll just add that the psychopath in question might be your own future self.

Oh boy... I believe I'm this kind of psycho, when I see my name in a git blame after tracing a bug that I didn't foresee... I feel awful, disgusted, then I fix it and think "You sure are dumbass, now try to be a lesser one".

Re: Nobody cares about your clean code

#44

Post by Mandatum »

StavrosK wrote: post #13
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #7

"throw the first one away" When I'm prototyping or hacking something together, I don't write tests, I don't comment/document much, I use lots of shitty variable/type names, lots of commented out code, debugging printfs, not much organization of files (often one large file). The prototype software is write-once, read-maybe. Maybe I'll want to see what I did down the road, but more likely I'll be shortly rewriting what…

When I'm prototyping or hacking something together, it eventually becomes production. I cannot relate to people who make prototypes to throw away, I've never done it, and I don't know why I'd do it. Due to that, I write my first line of code as if it's going to be on production forever, because it will.

Depends on the company environment. If your company does MVP's regularly to trial out stuff or features to get projects funded, they're more than likely will fund a short sprint to prove the concept or idea works and gauge if it's worth fully funding. These orgs move fast, have lots of tech talent and budget. They're usually ahead of other companies in terms of features or offerings.

Other companies take ideas, consider them long and hard - and usually follow other orgs doing something similar who have already proven something works. They do a lot of planning and tend to put much more funding in up-front.

Both approaches suit different businesses. The former being startups and SME's, the latter where market share is already won and now they just acquire other businesses that develop the former way.

If we're considering what people develop at home however.. 99.9% of the stuff I write is never publicly visible, and it's terrible because I'm not a great developer. But I'm not a regular open-source contributor. I issue the occasional patch for shit that's broken for me.

Re: Nobody cares about your clean code

#45

Post by livinginfear »

Silly premise. There's plenty of open-source products out there that will attest to the fact that the quality of a codebase has no effect on its overall commercial viability.

The adage "Move Fast and Break Things" is a cancer on the software industry. I've personally had the displeasure of working in numerous teams, departments and companies that adopted such silly philosophies in the pursuit of being "innovative". I've never seen it work in the long-term in a single instance. The cost of such mistakes are easily quantifiable. I'm sure most people here can think of fitting personal anecdotes where they've seen entire codebases rewritten to make them into scalable, maintainable solutions. Even this article lists several examples which attest to this. I shudder to think of the amount of money that has been invested in migrating codebases away from NodeJS, or MongoDB, for instance.

> "...or grow in a steady, sustainable and healthy pace and be eaten up by competition..."

Implying that it takes an order of magnitude more time to make responsible technology choices, or to write tests? This is rubbish. A stitch in time saves nine. I've never seen an instance where better management, better planning, and more responsible development couldn't have prevented a project from needing to be rewritten in twelve months.

Re: Nobody cares about your clean code

#46

Post by ghoward »

geofft wrote: post #29
StavrosK wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm prototyping or hacking something together, it eventually becomes production. I cannot relate to people who make prototypes to throw away, I've never done it, and I don't know why I'd do it. Due to that, I write my first line of code as if it's going to be on production forever, because it will.

Then write your code as if someone's going to throw production away - which generally means writing documentation (design docs, good commit messages, comments on the tricky parts of the code, API contracts between components, etc.), so that if someone thinks they want to to reimplement production, that decision can stand on its own merits. All of the worst production systems I've worked with are systems where people…

If you have a blog, make a production version of your comment and post it because what you said is something every developer should at least consider.

Re: Nobody cares about your clean code

#47

Post by jacobolus »

StavrosK wrote: post #25
gfodor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely prototype but the scenarios where I do are in the game engine context where I’m trying to hack together a real time graphics algorithm, meshing algorithm, etc. The difference between a one second and 15 second iteration time is meaningful.

Do you throw that code away and start over when you're done prototyping?

I would recommend you try writing hacky code and then throwing it away and starting from scratch a couple times on the same project idea, just to see how it goes. It might teach you something.

The people I know who regularly take this approach end up with a really fantastic code architecture in the end, and avoid a lot of pitfalls from their first naïve attempts.

Re: Nobody cares about your clean code

#50

Post by confounded »

pansa2 wrote: post #28
StavrosK wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm prototyping or hacking something together, it eventually becomes production. I cannot relate to people who make prototypes to throw away, I've never done it, and I don't know why I'd do it. Due to that, I write my first line of code as if it's going to be on production forever, because it will.

> I cannot relate to people who make prototypes to throw away, I've never done it, and I don't know why I'd do it. When I'm at the prototyping stage, I don't yet know how to solve the problem. That means I need to iterate quickly, which affects my choice of language (Python) and the amount of time I'm willing to spend keeping code clean (very little, because I could hit a dead-end at any point). But once I have a wor…

Is this stealth promotion for Go?
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