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Ask HN: What great software products have terrible code?
It's obvious that you can have great code and a bad product, but is the opposite true? What is the relationship between internal quality and the external perception of quality?
I feel that there is a high correlation between the two but given that I write code, I may be a biased.
- michaelsalim 4y agoHow would you define terrible code? If the product is great, then wouldn't the code be at the very least good enough? If it's about maintainability, I'd say a lot of legacy code fits. Magento, Wordpress.
- osigurdson 4y agoCode has an internal quality and an external market fit. I'm referring to the internal quality only. In terms of the specific term "terrible code", I think we've all seen it - it's the opposite of good code. I'm not familiar with Magneto but I don't feel that Wordpress is a great product, there is a cruftiness that I can feel from the outside.
- michaelsalim 4y agoThat's really hard to quantify. I've had many discussion with friends where I though the code was decent only for them to say it's the worst thing in the world. The reverse is also true. I've seen terrible code where others don't react as strongly as me. It really depends on what you consider terrible. Eg: Bad maintainability, complexity, no documentation, convoluted, etc. I guess there's also the question of what do you consider a great product? Little bugs? Does it need to be modern? Does the design matter? What do you mean cruftiness? That it's old? For me it's about doing the job it needs to do. WordPress for all its flaws still is my go to ecommerce platform (w/ Woocommerce) since it just works.
- osigurdson 4y agoI don’t believe quality is simply “eye of the beholder”, it is more fundamental than that. Many Chautauquas and much motorcycle maintenance needed to get to the bottom of that question.