According to my definitions, good code must perform correctly or else fail gracefully. It must also be robust, debuggable, and maintainable. Those extra condi

According to my definitions, good code must perform correctly or else fail gracefully. It must also be robust, debuggable, and maintainable. Those extra conditions mean thinking more, and writing more code. That takes extra time over hacking out the quick-and-dirty version. For example, right now I'm helping a friend out with a project to send email. In about 10 minutes I could whip something out that does this using backticks (i.e., shell escapes), no error checking, no logging, etc. It would be in front of the customer and suitable for feedback very quickly. It would also be short, easy to understand, and would do its job correctly 99% of the time. All of these are good things, but it would still be bad code, because the other 1% of the time it's going to break horribly and someone is going to have to come in and fix it.