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> And unless you do something to the environment, it doesn't wear down over time. Disagree here (at least in spirit?) - code smell can also point to maintainab
by a_t48 4y ago
> And unless you do something to the environment, it doesn't wear down over time.
Disagree here (at least in spirit?) - code smell can also point to maintainability issues - if the codebase is continually changed some code is more likely to break than others.
- noduerme 4y agoI'm kinda coming from a do-it-once, do-it-right background. Usually code I write just runs untouched for 10 years. So I'd classify any breaking changes to the codebase a change in the environment. But either way, something breaks or it doesn't. It's not like some non-obvious wear and tear is going to happen over a year or two on its own, if no human messes with it.
- mike_hock 4y agoI've never heard/read/thought of "code smell" as anything BUT referring to maintainability issues. When you're debugging a concrete issue and have a hunch what might be the cause, that's not a "code smell."
- noduerme 4y agoCode can smell and be perfectly maintainable. Sometimes it's even more maintainable, because it's so unnecessarily replicated that the patterns become obvious. You could even argue that the best precision code is the hardest to grok and maintain in the long run.
- mike_hock 4y agoA code smell is a heuristic to detect maintainability issues, so while a heuristic can fail, if it fails consistently, you're using a bad heuristic. Sounds like you're basing your heuristic on dogma rather than experience.