Who wrote this shit?
The are several insidious problems with trashing code are:<p>1. It becomes an impulse and ends up cropping up in places where code is not just perceived as shit, but also misunderstood. And once devs aren’t taking the time to fully understand code before judging it all is lost.<p>2. It takes mental resources to form the useless judgment and clouds the vision with its bias once it is made. Suddenly it’s more difficult to see the nuanced angles in the code since you’ve got a useless judgement taking up mental space and resources.<p>3. Again it’s habit forming and becomes a barrier to thinking freshly and creatively when faced with new code.<p>4. It’s negative.<p>5. As seen here in all the comments it is rediculously faulty.<p>6. ALL old code gets to be shit with varying degrees of speed. ALL code bases get old. If you want to work on an old codebase, it comes with the territory. You can be a grumpy old man about it, you can be a grumpy old man about anything, but the net effect is just making you a grumpier shittier developer.<p>In a similar way I have some coworkers who I know do not code as well because they don’t have the patience to be detail-oriented or pursue optimal solutions by any measure from code efficiency to maintainability. That’s about the worst thing I can think of to say about another programmer… and here’s the thing, they still occasionally write solutions borne of their own perspectives that I can learn from, their code still needs to be maintained, they sometimes do improve etc. If I let the author factor in I’m still going to miss things even if the prejudgment is right 90% of the time.<p>Finally, I think it is healthy to like people and find the good in them even if they are paddling against the boat, if you can’t lift them up or fire them it’s making the best of the situation. If you can understand that they are humans with their own things going on, that other humans could look at you exactly the same way, I think it lifts us all up.<p>This is my first HackerNews comment.<p>EDIT: Formatting. See previous line.