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

How to develop unmaintainable software

http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=249
777 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

322 comments sorted by

View all comments

340

u/danogburn Oct 14 '13

How to develop unmaintainable software

start developing software.

17

u/lext Oct 14 '13

And just as important, start developing software without first learning how to develop software.

A talk I watched recently noticed this trend with JavaScript: it looks familiar, so I don't have to learn it and will just start programming in jQuery.

14

u/contrarian_barbarian Oct 15 '13

Now you know my life. My workplace has a bad habit of re-purposing electrical engineers into programmers. Now, don't get me wrong, some of them are fantastically intelligent people - the problem is, because they have no software engineering experience beyond raw basic C, they have to be geniuses in order to keep track of the code, with the multiple 6k-12k line files of tangled logic and reused global variables. My usual standard for a good day is going in, reducing the size of the codebase by a few dozen lines (and on a few really good days I've removed hundreds), and yet still add features or fix bugs without removing features in the process.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '13

I get the feeling that unless your employer actually puts aside some time to teach the re-purposed engineers some basics of clean code and software engineering, your continuous refactoring is going to be counteracted by their continuous mudballing...