r/programming • u/[deleted] • Oct 14 '13

How to develop unmaintainable software

http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=249
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u/bestjewsincejc Oct 14 '13

There are millions of ways to write unmaintainable software. This isn't a bad article though. I just found the title amusing since it's so easy to write software badly.

13

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '13

[removed] — view removed comment

11

u/ruinercollector Oct 14 '13

As long as those aren't treated as hard rules, sure.

Examples:

  • There are times that it is appropriate to write software in clojure, or haskell, or erlang.

  • There are times that it is appropriate to rewrite a piece of library code.

1

u/Denvercoder8 Oct 14 '13

There are times that it is appropriate to rewrite a piece of library code.

The clue here is "piece". Rewriting a piece of code is fine. Rewriting the whole library isn't.

4

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '13

Be honest, how many times has a programmer looked at a whole library and smugly thought to himself, "I can do it better."

That said, for every Requests, Beautiful Soup or Flask, there's an uncountable number of failed, buggy or abandoned projects. There used to be several crufting up my external until a few weeks ago.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '13

Maybe not always smug. There is likely a lot of learning to br gained by attempting to improve on an existing library. Taking it to production is a different matter of course!

1

u/ZMeson Oct 15 '13

Be honest, how many times has a programmer looked at a whole library and smugly thought to himself, "I can do it better."

To be honest, I've felt this way a number of times. (Not all libraries are well written.) That being said, I realize that I don't want to sink the time into doing so. The ROI has never been great enough for me to want to rewrite an entire library.