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Your Coding Philosophies are Irrelevant

26 points by prajjwal 14y ago

kalimatas 14y ago
James Hague's posts are quite inspiring for me. Just like this one and his "Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program". After reading the latter I understood why I have so many problems while developing - I'm just trying to do everything perfect and right. Do do that! Just make your program work, because the actual goal of creating it.
viraptor 14y ago
Well, that's all really cool, until you have to start maintaining that kind of application. Suddenly you can discover that just fixing one simple bug in your popular and successful app takes almost a complete rewrite. It's all about the up front / ongoing cost balance...
powatom 14y ago
Apps don't GET finished without some kind of development approach / philosophy. 'I don't give a shit about maintainability' is a philosophy. It's just a really, really, bad one.
- ajuc 14y ago
  I think this article is written in a context of programmer doing side project, working alone. In such projects it's often the case, that programmer is more concerned with architecture, code style and cool techniques, than the end result - usability and features of the application. And when code invevitably becomes more messy, despite refactoring, programmer lose interest and leave the project unfinished forever. At least that's how many of my projects ended. In such context "make it work first" is a great advice.
ankurdhama 14y ago
This post seems to be like from a "manager" :) Code is written for "Humans" to read. Every projects needs to be evolved and in today's world that evolution should be very frequent otherwise you will be out of business soon. Having that kind of "ball of mud" code may doesn't make any difference to the first version of your product, but boy oh boy, as it will evolve in size and complexity, be ready for the frustration of your life. The only coding philosophy that matters is simplicity (in code/design), all other sub-philosophy should be to achieve this single philosophy.

26 points by prajjwal 14y ago

James Hague's posts are quite inspiring for me. Just like this one and his "Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program". After reading the latter I understood why I have so many problems while developing - I'm just trying to do everything perfect and right. Do do that! Just make your program work, because the actual goal of creating it.

viraptor 14y ago

Well, that's all really cool, until you have to start maintaining that kind of application. Suddenly you can discover that just fixing one simple bug in your popular and successful app takes almost a complete rewrite. It's all about the up front / ongoing cost balance...

powatom 14y ago

Apps don't GET finished without some kind of development approach / philosophy. 'I don't give a shit about maintainability' is a philosophy. It's just a really, really, bad one.

ajuc 14y ago
I think this article is written in a context of programmer doing side project, working alone. In such projects it's often the case, that programmer is more concerned with architecture, code style and cool techniques, than the end result - usability and features of the application. And when code invevitably becomes more messy, despite refactoring, programmer lose interest and leave the project unfinished forever. At least that's how many of my projects ended. In such context "make it work first" is a great advice.

ankurdhama 14y ago

This post seems to be like from a "manager" :) Code is written for "Humans" to read. Every projects needs to be evolved and in today's world that evolution should be very frequent otherwise you will be out of business soon. Having that kind of "ball of mud" code may doesn't make any difference to the first version of your product, but boy oh boy, as it will evolve in size and complexity, be ready for the frustration of your life. The only coding philosophy that matters is simplicity (in code/design), all other sub-philosophy should be to achieve this single philosophy.