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This is exactly why these words should be banned. What you fail to realize is that "good" or "bad", when applied to all these things, depends a lot on the conte

This is exactly why these words should be banned. What you fail to realize is that "good" or "bad", when applied to all these things, depends a lot on the context. You don't expect the same level of quality from a one-page script that will be used once, than from a crucial part of a large-scale program involving thousands of people. Spending two days making the script robust, modular, flexible and unit-tested is just as bad as pasting an undocumented hack in the large program. We need to try to be rational and stop mixing morals and code.

gbog 15y ago
> We need to try to be rational and stop mixing morals and code. It's funny because I think you are wrong. I would agree with stopping mixing aesthetics and code. The highest poetry from, say Mallarmé, has qualities that would be considered as stupid plain wrong pure evilness in code. But morals and code have relations. A lot of relations actually. My moral forbids me to steal and cook my neighbour's cat, not because it is forbidden, but because I have enough self-respect to not behave like that. The same applies when writting code. Even if operational pressure is high, I am not the kind of guy who will let the shitty work to other coders behind me. I have self-esteem, and don't want peer coder to think I am the worst shit in the world, so I just won't add crap to a pile of crap without doing reasonable efforts to do at least some cleaning. Like in the toilets: let it as clean as would have liked to find it yourself. Maybe we should first agree on what is "morals". For me it is not a set of predefined values like "good / bad", it is the very reason why we behave properly to each other (or not), it is a consequence of self-esteem. Oh, and I think a one-shot script do not need to be refactored to be "beautiful" mind you, no, I think it should be either trown away right after use, or at the very last marked very heavily in the file name and as the first uppercased line: one shot script, no fixing required.

gbog 15y ago

> We need to try to be rational and stop mixing morals and code. It's funny because I think you are wrong. I would agree with stopping mixing aesthetics and code. The highest poetry from, say Mallarmé, has qualities that would be considered as stupid plain wrong pure evilness in code. But morals and code have relations. A lot of relations actually. My moral forbids me to steal and cook my neighbour's cat, not because it is forbidden, but because I have enough self-respect to not behave like that. The same applies when writting code. Even if operational pressure is high, I am not the kind of guy who will let the shitty work to other coders behind me. I have self-esteem, and don't want peer coder to think I am the worst shit in the world, so I just won't add crap to a pile of crap without doing reasonable efforts to do at least some cleaning. Like in the toilets: let it as clean as would have liked to find it yourself. Maybe we should first agree on what is "morals". For me it is not a set of predefined values like "good / bad", it is the very reason why we behave properly to each other (or not), it is a consequence of self-esteem. Oh, and I think a one-shot script do not need to be refactored to be "beautiful" mind you, no, I think it should be either trown away right after use, or at the very last marked very heavily in the file name and as the first uppercased line: one shot script, no fixing required.