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My code might not be that elegant, but it's maintainable. I've followed "hey, it works" developers who knocked out functionality quickly. Their by-product was

• rnovak 13y ago
  Yeah, the code may work, but making changes to it may make me want to shoot myself. I work with the same types of devs, and modifying/extending their code could lead one to alcoholism. Seriously. No joke. I have quite honestly considered changing teams, just to get away from a code base that may "work", but induces nightmares.
• frenchy 13y ago
  This is a far better metric. Elegance, while a worthwhile goal, is at its best a vague notion and at its worst, a guise for all sorts of leaky abstractions.
  • courtf 13y ago
    I adore elegance, but over time have come to understand that edge cases tend to creep into those "leaky abstractions," and you can find yourself unraveling things, at least partially, in order to solve bugs. There's no shame in this IMHO, and lots of very good programmers have to add inelegant shims to solve specific edge cases. I enjoyed reading this article (previously linked on HN by another) which I think has some relevance here: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/ http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/
• EdwardDiego 13y ago
  Yeah, my team has inherited similar code from one particular Boy Wonder. One example was a service that imported JSON from third parties - it was unit tested, but the architecture was so poorly testable that it had mocked dependencies three levels deep. We also picked up a home-rolled reporting tool that was an instant injection of significant technical debt.