On Fri, 12 Dec 2003 at 23:40 GMT, Paul Morgan penned: [snip] > > In the real world: > > Do the simplest thing that is consistent with the specification. > Someone, whose skill level you can't predict, is going to have to > maintain it after you.
Corollary: Regardless of the skill level of the person who maintains the code after you, they will find your implementation unsatisfactory, bitch about it at every opportunity, and beg repeatedly to be allowed to rewrite it. (I recently made this point at a code review. Someone paused and said, "You know, you're right. In 20 years of software development, I've never once met someone who was happy with the code they'd inherited.") > This takes quite a bit of discipline. The temptation is always to > write something cool and clever. A lot of development (and support) > time and money gets wasted that way. Someone famous has a quote about how it's always harder to debug than it is to write code. Therefore, if you use the full extent of your cleverness in writing the code, you will never be able to debug it. Except they said it a lot better. I'm sure someone on this list knows the correct quote and attribution by heart. -- monique -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
