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Seems this "It’s because writing something new is cognitively less demanding than starting from scratch" could do with some editing. Doesn't new and scratch mea

Seems this "It’s because writing something new is cognitively less demanding than starting from scratch" could do with some editing. Doesn't new and scratch mean the same thing in this context? "The reason that [ developers ] think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it." Joel I couldn't agree less with this. Currently working on a large codebase built on top of Apache ofbiz with Java. At intervals every dev involved in this project reminds our boss he shouldn't be using this codebase. Of course, events always remind us we are wrong because many features that would've taken months of dev time and work are already implemented and taken advantage of. Anyway, takeaway, remind yourself - yeah - that reading code is hard!

agbell 5y ago
Good catch. I have fixed it. It's because writing something new is cognitively less demanding than the hard work of understanding an existing codebase, at least initially.
kaba0 5y ago
There are so utterly terrible codebases, on which we should pull the plug. But my experience is that even not-that-bad code bases will be seen as bad by new developers, solely because of their complexity (mostly inherent in this case). The thing is, programs grow continuously and they will pick up on complexity, and most software out there is simply beyond human understanding with every intricacy of it. And developer egos routinely say that the code is bad, instead of saying that they don’t understand the context of this and that decision.