funny I was reading this earlier and was almost gonna post this here. It's always so relevant.. I had code from another developer for something for the thing I'm working and was going to redo it all but realized we just had no way to get enough time in there to redo it and hell it works just fine etc.

I'm getting back into the whole techy online sphere after a while and am surprised to rediscover the quality of the writing afoot even in things like developer discussion lists.. it's like when you're trying to change minds in a serious way you work harder at your communication. Also I guess public-facing developers also just have writing as a general life skill via their education etc.

Also see Is Good Code Impossible?

That was a reasonable read. However because I code mostly in HTML & CSS I can quite rightly say that I often see very sucky code!

Wish I had a dollar for every font tag I've removed....

I work in a code base that at least fifty people have "contributed" to over the last eleven years with little or no co-ordination, standards or reviews so you can imagine the how bad it gets.

The coder that I immediately took over from three months ago wrote Python as if it were FORTRAN or maybe COBOL, I'm not sure. He didn't believe in breaking things down into smaller functions or using any control flow structures other than for loops and if-then statements. I have to debug stuff with 300 line long functions with if-then statements nested five levels deep. You see identical code all through his stuff too, he'd just copy-paste big chunks of stuff ten times instead of breaking it out into a helper function.

Management loved him though 'cause he could bang out the lines of code. Thousands and thousands of lines of the same crap. It runs but God save you if you want to maintain it or modify it. How he managed to get a CS degree in the late nineties without learning the slightest bit of object oriented design/coding astounds me.

sorry, that turned into a big ranty rant, didn't it. Blame the three Yuenglings I've had tonight.

that's crazy octothorpe

developers really need to spend time honing their craft rather than just getting things done. to easy to slip into the latter for large periods of time

I gave up programing so I wouldn't have to feel like my code sucks all the time.

I'm sure that my code sucks too.

Good commenting does wonders. Interesting read.