4 ms·
How do you know it works? Did you test it on every platform? What you would have to gain is maintainability. Maybe it's not worth it; maybe it is. But saying t
by samf 11y ago
How do you know it works? Did you test it on every platform?
What you would have to gain is maintainability. Maybe it's not worth it; maybe it is. But saying that there is nothing to be gained is just an opinion.
- joosters 11y agoI bet that it contains fewer bugs than a rewrite of the code will have! That code represents years of tweaks, fixes and obscure workarounds. There are countless problems that you will re-introduce with a code rewrite, because the subtleties in aged, thoroughly-used code are not immediately obvious.
- samf 11y agoI agree, I just think your initial statement was a bit extreme.
- joosters 11y agoYeah, on a re-read, my comment is too sure of itself. Never say never! But while there are always edge cases, IMO code rewriting is something that is almost never worth it. Especially a maintainability rewrite just for the sake of maintainability.
- ianamartin 11y agoI'm so sick of hearing this tripe. Rewriting code is almost always a good idea because after you re-write it, you have some snowball's chance in hell of understanding it. Oh, but Jeff Attwood said . . . Whatever. And then Jeff Atwood said something very different. Blah, blah, blah. If the engineer that wrote the code isn't at the company anymore, and no one really gets it now, rewrite it. At least you will have some chance of understanding the new bugs instead of failing to understand the old bugs (and there are bugs in that old code that you, for whatever reason can't read.) Rewrite. Always.
- 3d8995163 11y agoAre you trolling? This is one of the most wrong things I've ever read on HN. To take the most obvious point - how are you supposed to rewrite the code if you don't understand what it does?
- jheriko 11y agothe quality of the code shakes my faith in whoever debugged or fixed anything to have not introduced more bugs as they did so.