On February 24, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
> Does `cleaning up the unreadable ugly crap' count as `useful'? We all
> know that BBDB has quite a lot of that (although it has nothing anywhere
> near as bad as `c-guess-basic-syntax' in cc-mode, thank goodness)...
>
No, it doesn't count as useful. I fixed a bug last week that was
caused by 'cleaning up the unreadable ugly crap', and a career full of
maintaining other peoples' code has taught me that rewriting code that
you simply don't like the look of is a sure-fire recipe for
disaster. I have no problems with incremental `upgrades' to the code
when fixes are being made in the area, but I am flat out against
checkins which are merely code rewrites.
I will happily cite that joel-on-software article again. No, BBDB is
not as complex as Mozilla, but there are some important points made
there, the most significant of which is that accumulated code ==
accumulated knowledge, quite frequently, and by rewriting code you run
the risk of losing some of that accumulated knowledge.
Waider. Besides, are you saying the code isn't beautiful? Hmm?
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] / Yes, it /is/ very personal of me.
I really need to reinstate the witty comments, dammit.
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