3 ms·

My take on this from like 10 years ago: http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/06/getting-your-priorities-straight.html http://www.expatsoftware.com/articl

My take on this from like 10 years ago: http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/06/getting-your-priorities-straight.html http://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/06/getting-your-p... I came up with Readable as the top priority, followed by Debuggable and Maintainable. I suppose one could combine that into "Simple" if one liked. But yeah, Fast was already at the bottom of the list. Even back then.

collyw 8y ago
Those three properties are very highly related. Personally I found the biggest improvement to my own software came from maintaining the same system that I wrote for 4+ years. If I came back to a part and didn't understand it more or less immediately, then it was time to refactor it. I wrote the code I should understand what it is doing. No excuses that someone else had written bad code.
- HankB99 8y ago
  "It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand." (I was joking, of course, when I said this.) It seems to me that that's a reasonable metric for determining if something was well written or possibly well commented. I had an opportunity to go back to some of my older code about a year ago. It was scary to me what portion of it I no longer understood. Worse yet, portions of it referred to documentation that I could no longer find. The company had migrated their documentation through several storage organization technologies and no one seemed to know where the old stuff went. Luckily I ran across a retired engineer who recalled where a lot of it had been archived. (Unrelated) When I read the article, the first thing I thought was that all of the simple programs had already been written.
m90 8y ago
I'm getting ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH (no content displayed) on latest Chrome / Linux when trying to access the link (which force redirects me to use https). In case it's your site, you might want to know / fix.
- jasonkester 8y ago
  Thanks, Cloudflare. I noticed after posting that that blog is still running without SSL, so I did the quickest thing that would work and moved it over to Cloudflare and their Fast SSL product. Evidently, they're happy to start auto-forwarding http traffic over to https before finishing the part where https works. I've flipped it back off for the time being. Thanks for the heads up.

collyw 8y ago

Those three properties are very highly related. Personally I found the biggest improvement to my own software came from maintaining the same system that I wrote for 4+ years. If I came back to a part and didn't understand it more or less immediately, then it was time to refactor it. I wrote the code I should understand what it is doing. No excuses that someone else had written bad code.

HankB99 8y ago
"It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand." (I was joking, of course, when I said this.) It seems to me that that's a reasonable metric for determining if something was well written or possibly well commented. I had an opportunity to go back to some of my older code about a year ago. It was scary to me what portion of it I no longer understood. Worse yet, portions of it referred to documentation that I could no longer find. The company had migrated their documentation through several storage organization technologies and no one seemed to know where the old stuff went. Luckily I ran across a retired engineer who recalled where a lot of it had been archived. (Unrelated) When I read the article, the first thing I thought was that all of the simple programs had already been written.

m90 8y ago

I'm getting ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH (no content displayed) on latest Chrome / Linux when trying to access the link (which force redirects me to use https). In case it's your site, you might want to know / fix.

jasonkester 8y ago
Thanks, Cloudflare. I noticed after posting that that blog is still running without SSL, so I did the quickest thing that would work and moved it over to Cloudflare and their Fast SSL product. Evidently, they're happy to start auto-forwarding http traffic over to https before finishing the part where https works. I've flipped it back off for the time being. Thanks for the heads up.