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The risk of 'bad' code is that it might be hard to make the change you want. I would believe that spaghetti code is more likely to have bugs than 'well designed

The risk of 'bad' code is that it might be hard to make the change you want. I would believe that spaghetti code is more likely to have bugs than 'well designed' code. When code is fresh in your mind, there's more tolerance for how disorganised the code can be and still be easy to change. If your shipping method is "one shot".. time spent cleaning it has a chance to provide value; but time spent adding features is very likely adds value. -- Probably if the code is very clean, then at least some time would have been better spent adding features.

taeric 3y ago
You aren't wrong, but a lot of the risk of "good code" nowadays is that there is more of it. An added risk is a lot of "good code" is leaning heavily on practices that are not good for performance. I don't want to push for lax testing standards. And I generally prefer modern build practices for programming. It is hard to take a lot of criticism of gaming code seriously, though, as games were shipped at what feels like a higher success throughput than most business software.
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  "Bad" code also has way less abstractions. It's ridiculously easy to change something (unless it's really spaghetti/everything is intertwined) "Good" and modern code often has many abstractions. In some cases, that gives ultimate flexibility, but in some cases, if you are fighting the abstraction or the framework, it will make it almost impossible to change.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
    I was going to post this, abstractions almost never work out well as the code base changes
- gopher_space 3y ago
  The IRS isn’t going to get involved if your physics don’t match reality. Defining and creating your own data means you get to skip most of the headaches in business software development.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Not a small point, but I think it is more than IRS concerns that have caused web bloat. Gmail taking seconds to respond to keyboard is definitely not explained away with business logic being hard. Is it?

taeric 3y ago

You aren't wrong, but a lot of the risk of "good code" nowadays is that there is more of it. An added risk is a lot of "good code" is leaning heavily on practices that are not good for performance. I don't want to push for lax testing standards. And I generally prefer modern build practices for programming. It is hard to take a lot of criticism of gaming code seriously, though, as games were shipped at what feels like a higher success throughput than most business software.

Pannoniae 3y ago
"Bad" code also has way less abstractions. It's ridiculously easy to change something (unless it's really spaghetti/everything is intertwined) "Good" and modern code often has many abstractions. In some cases, that gives ultimate flexibility, but in some cases, if you are fighting the abstraction or the framework, it will make it almost impossible to change.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  I was going to post this, abstractions almost never work out well as the code base changes
gopher_space 3y ago
The IRS isn’t going to get involved if your physics don’t match reality. Defining and creating your own data means you get to skip most of the headaches in business software development.
- taeric 3y ago
  Not a small point, but I think it is more than IRS concerns that have caused web bloat. Gmail taking seconds to respond to keyboard is definitely not explained away with business logic being hard. Is it?