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by tgsovlerkhgsel 1302 days ago
On the other hand, if you spend all your time tidying and cleaning, you never get anything done.

There is such a thing as "too tidy", and while everyone disagrees on where the point is, companies tend to be very good at forcing that point through constrained resources.
1 comments
josephg 1302 days ago
I don’t think many projects are at much risk of that. Most professional code I’ve seen is a barely functional mess. There is such a thing as “too tidy”. But I can count the number of times I’ve seen it in my career on one hand.
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tgsovlerkhgsel 1301 days ago
I can not count the number of code review comments about missing periods at the end of comment lines on one hand. If you include comparably worthless comments, I can use the binary system and will still run out of hand...
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josephg 1301 days ago
Ah that’s fair. I have nothing but contempt for those sort of comments too. They feel like a sort of petty tyranny of small scale thinking. Good, clean software usually needs to go through a chaotic messy period to find its identity - and find what the core abstractions really are. Like, first get the big details wrong, then iterate until you get the big details right enough. Then focus on the medium details, then the small details. Then release. Doing that process out of order is at best a waste of time, and at worst a massive distraction. Our attention is our most precious commodity as programmers. Wasting it inappropriately is criminal.

If you want to move deck chairs around on the titanic, at least have the common decency not to drag the rest of us into your orbit of BS.

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