4 ms·
When my room is dirty, I clean it. When it's really dirty, I pay a professional to clean it. I don't burn my house down and start over.
by JBReefer 11y ago
When my room is dirty, I clean it. When it's really dirty, I pay a professional to clean it. I don't burn my house down and start over.
- maxsilver 11y agoAnd when your room is so dirty that there are bugs in the walls, termites eating the wood, the thermostat is leaking mercury, the ceiling is dropping lead paint + asbestos, and the foundation is cracked and pulling the house apart ... you burn your house down, and start over. As technology people, I agree that we lean far too heavily towards the "rewrite it" option than we should. But that doesn't mean it's never the right option.
- JBReefer 11y agoI deeply get your point, but to step away from the metaphor, usually the problem of shitty code is a lack of focus on continual refinement instead of adding features, which is a management/process problem. If you have a serious problem with your process, you're never going to build a solid code base. Hell, at my last company, we have a big server product made of duct tape and spit, and about halfway through a total rebuild, we had another ball of spit and duct tape made of a slightly trendier stack. We added coders, we brought in front end guys, but guess who we didn't replace?
- gutnor 11y agoWorse than that - if just the foundations are bad, you may have to start the house over. Even if the house is fine but you get the wrong type of mushroom in the wall of 1 room, the house will have to be rebuild. Strange analogy by GP, you have way more possibilities of fixing stuff in the software world than in the physical one.