Couple things happened today (Friday, of all days):
- My old blog hosting company sent a "we are shutting down" notice. Out of curiosity I clicked through and quickly found myself reading 5-year old posts. One of them was ranting about code maintenance.
- A friend tweeted a link to a blog post by Rohan Singh: Isn't All Coding About Being Too Clever? where he's also talking about maintainable code (with a different perspective).
This got me thinking...
In majority of software engineering literature, "maintainability" of code is hailed as sacred. It's easy to relate to the sentiment: no code gets written once and then forgotten. When you ship code, you give it birth, but the actual life of that code is only just starting. You want to make sure your code spends its life well -- goes to college, marries the right person, and makes the "parents" proud when other people have to deal with it (that's the maintenance part).
Except, much like with kids, your plans for your code almost never work out as initially intended. If you are smart enough you accept them just the way they turn out to be (at least - code, if not kids) , without trying to be a control freak. And that's where this obsession with "maintenance" can become a problem.
RSS Feed
