This is the most important thing: "Unless and until the code is used it's all meaningless." The risk of writing perfect unused code is significant, and the co

This is the most important thing: "Unless and until the code is used it's all meaningless." The risk of writing perfect unused code is significant, and the consequences are pretty grave. I think worrying about how "good" your code is should be secondary to worrying how usable your code is. Yes, maintenance & debugging can really suck. But optimizing to make maintenance & debugging better won't serve your users well if your code never launches.