My apologies for beating this dead horse...
I am just unable to get my point across at all today.
On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Kyle Dawkins wrote:
> Tom et al.
>
> > This is, in my opinion, circular logic. Perhaps the reason that you
> > barely have enough time to go to the bathroom is that you're
> > writing the code the wrong way. :-)
>
...my point with that scenario was that there is just too much work to
spend the time writing highly maintainable code that has only the simplest
of maintance tasks.
> Just because we use free and/or open source tools to build our code, doesn't
> mean we can write crap. We have an obligation to do our duty to whomever we
> work for, and LEARN and apply that learning to our work.
>
> > > There is always more then one way to do it, and there's usually more
> > > then one right way to do it. Let's keep that in mind.
> >
> > Agreed. However, Perl + HTML + SQL isn't one of the right ways! :-)
>
> Couldn't agree more. Just because TMTOWDI doesn't mean that all of those
> ways are equal. Most ways suck, in fact.
Granted, the world is full of incompetance, but if you spent your time
coding for a perfect world in every situation, you could still be working
on the write-up while the next guy is collecting the check for a finished
project and bidding on the next project, might not be bad code, might be
really good code, might really suck, who cares, it works, the customer is
happy and both businesses do well, the down side is some geek may have to
maintain it but they'll get to complain about crappy code and show their
rightousness on a public mailing list.
Don't get me wrong here, I agree with the perfect code... I'd absolutely
love to see a clean solution to embedded html/perl/sql that has fast
performance, fast development and easy maintainability. I wish that the
technically best way always matched the right way. And us righteous
developers decided how the world was run. But my misintrepreted point is
that there are situations in which this version of "perfect code" has no
place, even if I can't write them up in an email.
