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Are you the only working on the codebase? It may be easy to rewrite your own codebase, but it's certainly not easy to rewrite someone else's. Especially if th

• hinkley 5y ago
  You can go really really fast when you don’t give a shit about consequences. Often the worst code comes from prolific people. There’s just so much if it. And if you touch it you will break it at least 1% of the time, so you have to pick your battles when you are trying to keep the ratio under control.
  • skohan 5y ago
    If you write loosely-coupled code, it shouldn't be that easy to break things unless you're careless.
    • hinkley 5y ago
      If it were loosely coupled it wouldn’t be an anecdote in this conversation. There is no “I”, there is no “you”. There is only “us”. I can only control Us so much, and I don’t have a time machine. People who only have green field projects as their context are very frustrating in conversations like this. They make suggestions like, well, don’t fuck up in the first place. I don’t know what your history is but that’s the feeling I’m getting.
      • skohan 5y ago
        Not that it matters but I've worked on a mix of green-field projects and mature codebases in various domains with teams of various sizes over more than a decade of professional experience. I could assume you're throwing shade on "prolific programmers" out of some sense of insecurity, but it wouldn't be fair to generalize about strangers on the internet ;)
        • hinkley 5y ago
          No, It’s an overdeveloped sense of justice. I just punch up at condescending people. Every discipline has a bunch of armchair people who don’t understand the problem who think “get more exercise” is the response to depressed people or people with chronic fatigue, “eat fewer calories” is the answer to weight issues or diabetes, or “write it right the first time” is a useful response to people trying to solve real world problems. Kindly let the grownups talk and keep your flash card answers to yourself.
          • skohan 5y ago
            > Kindly let the grownups talk Well one of us is certainly being condescending ;) And did you really answer twice to the same comment? My goodness I must have really struck a nerve.
            • nfw2 5y ago
              Well this escalated quickly
        • hinkley 5y ago
          If everyone is discussing a problem that you don’t see, then why offer your simple solution except to appear smart? And who needs to appear smart? That’s your insecurity. Not mine.
    • hinkley 5y ago
      Nobody in this whole post is talking about loosely coupled code. If you find someone complaining about how hard it is to modify loosely coupled code, you have my permission to fire them. For everyone else this is tautological. Good code can continue to be good code.
• skohan 5y ago
  Idk maybe it's because I did freelancing for quite some time and was often hired to clean up somebody's mess, but I think it's not so bad to rewrite someone else's code. What I normally do is quarantine the old code behind a clean interface, or else start fresh with a better code structure, and then copy and paste the good bits of business logic from the old project into the new one. Code has a lot of really great properties which make it easy to modify in provably safe ways if you know what you're doing.