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_why's view on messy code is drastically under-appreciated. One can imagine how much energy is wasted revising commits and over-massaging code just to make the

• viraptor 17y ago
  I have a completely different feeling. It's ok if you depend on such code as long as it's actively supported by the creator himself. As soon as you need to modify it for your needs, or adopt the whole project, because it was dropped -- you start to appreciate clean and consistent code. If the code is too messy, you just end up rewriting most of it, in order to understand it. There would be no reason to do that if the original was clean and documented.
  • _delirium 17y ago
    There are different kinds of cleanliness though, I think. I've often found it easier to modify idiosyncratic code than code written in the Standard way, though things vary in both kinds. I do agree documentation is rather important; well-commented idiosyncratic code that explains the author's mental model is light-years easier than idiosyncratic code without any explanation. But, I do find that code written in sort of industry-standard style often is hugely over-architected, with a lot of boilerplate and cruft, and not all that easy to modify if I want to adapt it to my personal ends; i.e. my use-case is a single programmer wanting to put in 5-10 hours to make a small to moderate change. You end up in a maze of Factories and Interfaces trying to figure out where anything is actually done. The idiosyncratic code often just does away with all that architecture, which can sometimes be easier to deal with.
• qazxsw 17y ago
  Did he explicitly write on this? Linkage?