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> code that can't be read won't run for long There's plenty of ossified code people are scared to touch because they don't understand it, but stake their busin

• thfuran 3y ago
  And even executables for which the source code has been lost but which are still important to business operations.
• Lutger 3y ago
  Or just code that works and nobody wants or needs to spend money on changing. I've written such code, very crappy stuff. And then coming back to the client many, many years later, finding it all just humming along, driving their business critical applications without it or the computer it runs on ever having been updated once in 5 years or so. I was so surprised, and a bit scared. Sometimes when you don't change anything, it just keeps working. So I guess that makes it a very boring: code that can't be read won't be changed and will not be relevant for long, but not always
• couchand 3y ago
  One of my clients is convinced that a short hunk of JavaScript code that nobody can clearly describe the behavior of is their most valuable asset. Non-coders are weird.
• LtWorf 3y ago
  I (very briefly) worked in a startup whose business was search (on a certain domain) and they had no tests for their "Search.java" file (the real name was 300x longer, because java devs…). I had found some operations to tweak the scoring, except that some were multiplications by one, so I removed them. But I got told to not touch them because they wouldn't know if I had broken it until some customer complained. The CTO told me off for my completely irresponsible behaviour.