[jebraat]

Thanks for the comment Michael!

I 100% understand the "it's really hard to leave working but ugly code alone" sentiment", as I get the same feeling a lot of the time. That is one of the reasons I wrote this article.

I often have to fight myself to move on to do work on other things.

[michaelwww]

Other programmers can be harsh critics and it's important not to internalize these critics. This isn't a knock on other programmers, but the criticism is often based on their own perfectionism!

[slindsey]

Those "other programmers" that are "harsh critics" are often ourselves. How many times have you (any programmer) looked at your own old code and thought, "what they hell was I thinking?"

I can't count the times I've looked at ugly code, fired off `git blame`, and found out it was me.

[jstimpfle]

My experience has often been feeling that something wasn't right and trying to fix it at a low level - variable or function names, length of lines and expressions, organizations in files, things like that. Often I would clean up things superficially but the feeling that something is wrong remains.

Sometimes I come up back after years, having learnt how to organize certain kinds of programs better, and can instantly see that the problem was much deeper than that. I now think that as a rule of thumb, if it is hard to make a piece of code tidy at a superficial level, there is a deeper underlying issue. If I manage to find a good architecture, I try to keep the bad code as minimal as possible instead of investing more time in a dead end.