[FRIAM] IT is Not Sustainable

[Russell Standish]

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 07:29:27AM +0000, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Most programmers won't struggle to rationalize or improve code written by other people.    The problem is that people are selfish.  They think that their 10K LOC problem is beautiful and nimble, but that 1M LOC was once that too.    It's the behavior of teenagers.

Well the examples I mentioned were all rewritten/refactored from a
selfish need - I had inherited code that I had experienced as having
high technical debt, requiring much more effort to modify for future
needs than ought to be, and eventually persuaded my PM that fixing
that debt was a good investment.

Of course a piece of crap code that happens to work just fine, and
doesn't need to be touched, I will leave that well alone, of if
necessary, craft an interface that takes care of administrative needs
(such as memory allocation and so on). I only refactor code that gets
in the way of getting the job done.

My point really was that the difficulty of working on a codebase is
directly correlated with LOC, and that acceptable brevity a desirable
trait (my taste for brevity seems to be much more developed than many
of my colleagues, however, perhaps because I have a mathematical
background!).


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Dr Russell Standish                    Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellow        hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University         http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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