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by zeroonetwothree 955 days ago
It’s great until there’s some new regulation or costumer requirement and it can’t possibly be added to the monstrosity and so you lose those millions until you can rewrite, which takes months.
1 comments

Rewriting 5000 lines doesn’t take months. I actually ended up refactoring it in under 24 hours to make it about 10x more reliable and performant (after I put out the immediate fires that had me looking at it in the first place).

In general, I agree. I don’t write code that bad, even for prototypes. That said, I worry a lot less about being super meticulous DRY and best practices in my prototypes that in 90% of cases will never touch millions in value. Done is better than perfect.

Done is not always "better than perfect". A bridge that is done isn't better if it collapses due to poor engineering and kills people.

All software is not life or death. But software can be something people come to rely on.

If I choose (unknowingly) to rely on software not done well and it bites me, I personally would rather not have relied on it at all.