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by reverendsteveii
470 days ago
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> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. -- Abelson & Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs I've been living by this my entire career without ever having read this book. I just snagged it. I really do believe that our primary job is to write code that people can understand and I justify it with a 2 axis analysis: code is either correct or incorrect, and comprehensible or incomprehensible. Code that is correct doesn't require any attention and isn't worth considering. All the code we care about is incorrect, then, and so it's either comprehensible (and therefore fixable) or it's not. Given those facts, and the understanding that code rot and AC changes cause all code to become incorrect over time, my primary job is to write code that other developers can understand so that when it becomes incorrect they can do something about it. |
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Until the requirements of the system (of any kind) change and now the code isn't 'correct' for the new requirements and needs updating.