Again to the house analogy, if you could just build 3 vestibules to see how they fit with just a little typing, that would be far and away preferable to committing to everything on paper before hand.
Example:
Dendrite[0] was going to be a Rewrite of Synapse (which was a prototype which ended up going into production). The rewrite started more than 5 years ago, had lots of development breaks and it still is nowhere complete or close to replace a existing Synapse instance (which even today is ... Well ... suboptimal software).
The current plans are to support and use both servers long term, because Synapse is already too widespread.
I wouldn't call that cheap.
Isn't your example proof of the benefit of pragmatic coding? Synapse is actually serving users right now. Dendrite sounds like a "better design" which is stuck in purgatory.
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta
You don't see all the perfectly designed codebases that never went anywhere.
We only talk about legacy code because it's the one that pays the bills.
My definition of "good-quality" code is pretty much exactly "how difficult would this codebase be for a new engineer to understand and modify safely."
Often the worst code comes from prolific people. There’s just so much if it. And if you touch it you will break it at least 1% of the time, so you have to pick your battles when you are trying to keep the ratio under control.
People who only have green field projects as their context are very frustrating in conversations like this. They make suggestions like, well, don’t fuck up in the first place. I don’t know what your history is but that’s the feeling I’m getting.
I could assume you're throwing shade on "prolific programmers" out of some sense of insecurity, but it wouldn't be fair to generalize about strangers on the internet ;)
I just punch up at condescending people. Every discipline has a bunch of armchair people who don’t understand the problem who think “get more exercise” is the response to depressed people or people with chronic fatigue, “eat fewer calories” is the answer to weight issues or diabetes, or “write it right the first time” is a useful response to people trying to solve real world problems.
Kindly let the grownups talk and keep your flash card answers to yourself.
Well one of us is certainly being condescending ;)
And did you really answer twice to the same comment? My goodness I must have really struck a nerve.
For everyone else this is tautological. Good code can continue to be good code.
Code has a lot of really great properties which make it easy to modify in provably safe ways if you know what you're doing.
Which isn't to say that rewriting can't be cheap, but some intentional design (or at least diligent maintenance and refactoring) must have gone into the system to support that style of development. At which point you're back to targeting "quality," even if it's no longer a focus of on the smaller scale.
If the amount of time that it takes to rewrite something is trivial (a week or less) then you aren't working on something all that big/complicated.