InfoQ Homepage Presentations Who Ever Said Programs Were Supposed to be Pretty?
Who Ever Said Programs Were Supposed to be Pretty?
01:01:26
Summary
Brian Foote wonders in this session if the quest for clean or beautiful code makes sense in a bottom-line obsessed business world.
Bio
Brian Foote holds the position of Senior Scientist at the Refactory, Inc. and has a long affiliation with the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is well known in the object, patterns, and Smalltalk communities.
About the conference
Software is changing the world; QCon aims to empower software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the enterprise software development community; to achieve this, QCon is organized as a practitioner-driven conference designed for people influencing innovation in their teams: team leads, architects, project managers, engineering directors.
Mar 15, 2012
Community comments
Fun talk
by peter lin,
Re: Fun talk
by Simon Turner,
Excellent talk - "ball of mud is your choice!"
by Sai Matam,
Fun talk
by peter lin,
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As someone who enjoys the trenches and deciphering other people's code, a lot of the examples ring true.
Re: Fun talk
by Simon Turner,
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It's simply a myth that dirty=fast. Programmers that produce ugly code also tend to be amongst the least bright, the least experienced, the least motivated or a combination of all three. This means that they tend to be far less productive then the "quick-and-dirty" ethos would suggest. This is exacerbated when the program is of any significant size, because then programmers are required to collaborate, and ugly, unreadable code misses the opportunity to be internally expressive of its intent and organisation. It gets yet worse when programs have a significant lifespan, since ugly code eventually deteriorates to such an extent that it becomes impossible to extend or adapt expeditiously. I've seen one business fail completely as a direct result of all this, and another brought to its knees. Not pretty.
Excellent talk - "ball of mud is your choice!"
by Sai Matam,
Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.
Excellent talk. The talk started out being funny. But it was not funny anymore as I realized that the funny things that Brian mentioned were true! It is a lifestyle choice! Do you want the 'big ball of mud' ?
Sai Matam
www.codewalk.com