Yes. Real code that actually works in the real world, for large numbers of users, on all sorts of weird platforms and configurations, tends to accumulate some c

Yes. Real code that actually works in the real world, for large numbers of users, on all sorts of weird platforms and configurations, tends to accumulate some cruft. I'm sure there exist beautiful, production code bases that have been downloaded and/or used millions of times, but there's no shame in some ugly code. I seem to remember an old piece by jwz talking about the "clean-up rewrite of Netscape" and how the poor folks who were doing it then had to re-fix and re-workaround all of the myrid ways that broken old versions of ftp servers implement the protocol. It was probably ugly code, but it worked, and the clean code only stayed that way until it met the enemy...