this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
339 points (96.2% liked)

Programming

17504 readers
13 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]



founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You've given a lot of consideration to modern recently created code. But the best modern recent code goes on to become someone's legacy nightmare. (The most fit and correct code survives long after anyone really wishes it would.)

In high quality legacy nightmare code "why" is lost, unless someone wrote it down.

I've been on both sides of that mystery. "Why didn't they just do X?"

  • Sometimes it was because X didn't exist yet, or wasn't matute enough.
  • Sometimes it was because X is fundamentally the wrong solution, in a very subtle way.

There's two ways to know the difference:

    1. Painful trial and error.
    1. A comment (or document) answering "why".

I prefer the second way, but I happily charge more for the first way.