3 ms·
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 wrot
by 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 Luckily I ran across a retired engineer who recalled where a lot of it had been archived.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.