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Is code more like poetry or more like a recipe? If the former, then yes we should be allowed the time and space to craft the highest syntactic art imaginable. B

Is code more like poetry or more like a recipe? If the former, then yes we should be allowed the time and space to craft the highest syntactic art imaginable. But if it's the latter, it should just be quick, correct, readable, and extensible. If it's art - how dare you ruin my masterpiece? If it's business - we had a solution deployed for the customer in less than an hour. If syntax (poetry) is your #1 take your time. If money is your #1 you wouldn't call it "crappy code" at all. Even code that is not as performant as it could be is only "crappy" if it's affecting the bottom line (which it often does). But so-called bad code that is yielding higher profits, hard to call crappy.

OrigamiPastrami 2y ago
> If it's business - we had a solution deployed for the customer in less than an hour. Boeing was good at finding cheaper solutions to business problems as well. In the end it's society that suffers for our tolerance of late stage capitalism. There is no "right" answer to this. But tolerating crappy engineering because it's cost effective seems like an admission of defeat to people that actually want to make things better. It's not so much letting perfect be the enemy of good enough; it's more about the steady decline in quality because that's what we incentivize.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I have found that "it depends" is an almost universal solvent for all technical quandaries. I have found in my experience (and I have a lot of that), that the search for "One Solution To Rule Them All" is a snipe hunt. You can't get there from here. It always (in my experience) comes down to context[s]. That "[s]" is important. There's the current context, and then, there is the future context. You survived your baptism in fire to live to keep delivering software. That's great. It's crap software that got you here. Time to rewrite it, so we now have software with a future Right? OK? That's what we'll do...right? Oh, for Cthulhu's sake, what do you mean we need to keep building on our foundation of sand? Congratulations. You now not only have technical debt; you have technical bankruptcy, coming down the road. Better sell the company fast, before the bomb goes off...
- Viliam1234 2y ago
  The mythical "later" never happens. Today we need to get version 1.0 to the market ASAP. Tomorrow we will need to get version 2.0 to the market ASAP. Etc. It's like people who promise that they will stop smoking later. Twenty years later, they usually still smoke. Twenty years later, if the software still exists, all the technical debt tickets will probably still be in the backlog.
cjfd 2y ago
It is you who starts to talk about 'art' en 'poetry' but these words do not come from what you are reacting to. One thing you seem to assume is that the 'crappy code' works and therefore the concerns about its crappiness must be about irrelevant things like 'art' or 'poetry'. However, the working of what I would consider crappy code is generally highly tenuous. There has not been found a bug, YET...., but one difference between crappy code and good code is that in crappy code one is quite sure there are lurking many bugs that are just waiting for the right circumstances to occur in practice. Also when bad code is changed, this is a much riskier affair because it is difficult to be sure that no unwanted side-effects were introduced. There is a hypothesis that the crappy code was faster to write. At some point, this becomes false because one also has to spend time fixing the bugs. I would wager that this duration is measured in weeks, rather than months. From which it follows that the picking crappy code for speed is actually foolish and lowers profits for all but the most simple projects.
- bschmidt1 2y ago
  > must be about irrelevant things like 'art' or 'poetry' If by "bad code" you mean something related to syntax, convention, or code that "might have bugs" (wtf), there is still a case it's actually "good code" if it's more readable, was a quicker solution that yields higher profits, is a less error prone approach to the larger management of the codebase albeit less performant etc. > one difference between crappy code and good code is that in crappy code one is quite sure there are lurking many bugs Sounds too superficial/judgmental and not evidence-based. If there is a bug there is a bug. Even perfectly written code to the best possible standard can still be code that does the wrong thing.
  - orwin 2y ago
    Poor architecture/design make code unmaintanable, or at least very expensive to maintain. I would rather have my junior spend 3 more days to understand the FSM we use to handle our front before changing anything than him adding 2 random useState an a random useEffect because it just works. How you handle your data is also very telling of the code quality. I'm not against the "write shit fast, fix later", it is in fact how i do my stuff, but once i have a functioning prototype and basic mocks, i then spend a long time in my models.xxx file because modeling data is like 30% of the job. I have an example of bad data modelling: your object (that is a data representation) have fields that in certain case will be empty and you know it. Some people will ignore them. In 90% of the cases, this is a mistake that will lead to mistake down the lane. If you can use discriminated unions and don't because "it's faster" (it takes literally 2 minutes to do), you are probably writing bad code. It's not about idiomatic or not following conventions (those help) or not typing your data, it's about bad modeling choices.
andrepd 2y ago
> so-called bad code that is yielding higher profits, hard to call crappy Missing the point of the person you're replying to entirely... Yes you can get higher profits with shittier code, just as you can by building shittier airplanes, cars, bridges, etc. The consequences being exploits, hacks, 737MAX, Ford Pinto, etc
- bschmidt1 2y ago
  I think you missed the point that it wouldn't actually be shittier code in that case. Some ugly 4 space indented, wrong kind of loops, old Node version, mongo as the main db, no linter, callback hell SaaS platform in 1 file called "server.js" could still be more reliable and yield higher profits and sooner than your masterpiece in Rust.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    Yes, and then your user's personal details go on a darkweb leak. But who cares! You made bank and no law or liability will actually punish you for it, so what the hell.
    - bschmidt1 2y ago
      No need for a dark web, Twitter and GitHub have both leaked user passwords stored in plain text on their own platforms right here on the corporate web. Twitter who struggled to turn a profit (but not to pay its investors who became wildly rich off it) hired artists who chose technology like Ruby on Rails. They should have hired capitalists who breathed jQuery and ate pieces of sh*t like Active Record for breakfast

OrigamiPastrami 2y ago

> If it's business - we had a solution deployed for the customer in less than an hour. Boeing was good at finding cheaper solutions to business problems as well. In the end it's society that suffers for our tolerance of late stage capitalism. There is no "right" answer to this. But tolerating crappy engineering because it's cost effective seems like an admission of defeat to people that actually want to make things better. It's not so much letting perfect be the enemy of good enough; it's more about the steady decline in quality because that's what we incentivize.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

I have found that "it depends" is an almost universal solvent for all technical quandaries. I have found in my experience (and I have a lot of that), that the search for "One Solution To Rule Them All" is a snipe hunt. You can't get there from here. It always (in my experience) comes down to context[s]. That "[s]" is important. There's the current context, and then, there is the future context. You survived your baptism in fire to live to keep delivering software. That's great. It's crap software that got you here. Time to rewrite it, so we now have software with a future Right? OK? That's what we'll do...right? Oh, for Cthulhu's sake, what do you mean we need to keep building on our foundation of sand? Congratulations. You now not only have technical debt; you have technical bankruptcy, coming down the road. Better sell the company fast, before the bomb goes off...

Viliam1234 2y ago
The mythical "later" never happens. Today we need to get version 1.0 to the market ASAP. Tomorrow we will need to get version 2.0 to the market ASAP. Etc. It's like people who promise that they will stop smoking later. Twenty years later, they usually still smoke. Twenty years later, if the software still exists, all the technical debt tickets will probably still be in the backlog.

cjfd 2y ago

It is you who starts to talk about 'art' en 'poetry' but these words do not come from what you are reacting to. One thing you seem to assume is that the 'crappy code' works and therefore the concerns about its crappiness must be about irrelevant things like 'art' or 'poetry'. However, the working of what I would consider crappy code is generally highly tenuous. There has not been found a bug, YET...., but one difference between crappy code and good code is that in crappy code one is quite sure there are lurking many bugs that are just waiting for the right circumstances to occur in practice. Also when bad code is changed, this is a much riskier affair because it is difficult to be sure that no unwanted side-effects were introduced. There is a hypothesis that the crappy code was faster to write. At some point, this becomes false because one also has to spend time fixing the bugs. I would wager that this duration is measured in weeks, rather than months. From which it follows that the picking crappy code for speed is actually foolish and lowers profits for all but the most simple projects.

bschmidt1 2y ago
> must be about irrelevant things like 'art' or 'poetry' If by "bad code" you mean something related to syntax, convention, or code that "might have bugs" (wtf), there is still a case it's actually "good code" if it's more readable, was a quicker solution that yields higher profits, is a less error prone approach to the larger management of the codebase albeit less performant etc. > one difference between crappy code and good code is that in crappy code one is quite sure there are lurking many bugs Sounds too superficial/judgmental and not evidence-based. If there is a bug there is a bug. Even perfectly written code to the best possible standard can still be code that does the wrong thing.
- orwin 2y ago
  Poor architecture/design make code unmaintanable, or at least very expensive to maintain. I would rather have my junior spend 3 more days to understand the FSM we use to handle our front before changing anything than him adding 2 random useState an a random useEffect because it just works. How you handle your data is also very telling of the code quality. I'm not against the "write shit fast, fix later", it is in fact how i do my stuff, but once i have a functioning prototype and basic mocks, i then spend a long time in my models.xxx file because modeling data is like 30% of the job. I have an example of bad data modelling: your object (that is a data representation) have fields that in certain case will be empty and you know it. Some people will ignore them. In 90% of the cases, this is a mistake that will lead to mistake down the lane. If you can use discriminated unions and don't because "it's faster" (it takes literally 2 minutes to do), you are probably writing bad code. It's not about idiomatic or not following conventions (those help) or not typing your data, it's about bad modeling choices.

andrepd 2y ago

> so-called bad code that is yielding higher profits, hard to call crappy Missing the point of the person you're replying to entirely... Yes you can get higher profits with shittier code, just as you can by building shittier airplanes, cars, bridges, etc. The consequences being exploits, hacks, 737MAX, Ford Pinto, etc

bschmidt1 2y ago
I think you missed the point that it wouldn't actually be shittier code in that case. Some ugly 4 space indented, wrong kind of loops, old Node version, mongo as the main db, no linter, callback hell SaaS platform in 1 file called "server.js" could still be more reliable and yield higher profits and sooner than your masterpiece in Rust.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Yes, and then your user's personal details go on a darkweb leak. But who cares! You made bank and no law or liability will actually punish you for it, so what the hell.
  - bschmidt1 2y ago
    No need for a dark web, Twitter and GitHub have both leaked user passwords stored in plain text on their own platforms right here on the corporate web. Twitter who struggled to turn a profit (but not to pay its investors who became wildly rich off it) hired artists who chose technology like Ruby on Rails. They should have hired capitalists who breathed jQuery and ate pieces of sh*t like Active Record for breakfast