Subj : Re: Is well written code a rare species ?
To   : comp.programming
From : akarl
Date : Sat Aug 13 2005 03:07 pm

Roger Willcocks wrote:
> I think time pressures and laziness play their part too. When I'm writing 
> something tricky (*), I sometimes write very ugly code with lots of global 
> variables, misnamed variables, commented out and misleading code and a 
> liberal use of goto.
> 
> But once I understand what it is that I'm trying to do, I'll do some very 
> heavy refactoring to de-uglify the code. It still does the same thing, but 
> other people (and me in a few months) stand at least some hope of 
> understanding what's going on.
> 
> The notion of what's ugly and what's not is an open question, but I've seen 
> quite a few examples of code where the writer just stops when it 'works', 
> for some value of 'works'.
> 
> Knowing what it is, exactly, that the code is trying to achieve is 
> important, as is having good test data.

"Pedantry in programming is not a luxury, but a necessity." -- N. Wirth

August

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