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by Ygg2 156 days ago
Liability is also an economic term. As in, "The bank's assets (debt) are my liability, and my assets (house) are the bank's liability."

I don't think it's a wrong quote. Code's behavior is the asset, and code's source is the liability. You want to achieve maximum functionality for minimal source code investment.

1 comments

Sorry, my point wasn't that liability doesn't have a meaning in finance. My read of the quote is that it uses liability in the sense of risk not debt on a balance sheet.

I could always be wrong though, that was just my interpretation of it. I don't get how code could be a liability in the financial sense, but I do get how every line of code risks bugs and other issues.

Sure, but all code is a potential future debt.

You wrote a music player that only allows one artist from list of all artists? Tech debt.

You wrote optimized assembly for x86_64? It's the year 2060, and we only support NGPU_ARM_N_LEG.

The moment your expectations change (which is all the time), your code needs to be changed, and effort isn't free.

Tech debt is not part of a financial account or disclosure though. Yes those are forms of debt, no they aren't financial debts or financial liabilities.
Sure it isn't. It is still a financial liability. You need to sacrifice time clearing it to get to work that actually pays the bills.