Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
Syntactic Confectionery Delight
 
PerlMonks  

comment on

( [id://3333]=superdoc: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??
    Some software follows this pattern and when it does, it usually follows it right to the point where it does a lot of stuff which isn't useful and none of it very well. I think that's true whether its full of kludges or cleanly designed.

    In my experience, there is a whole helluva lot of software out there in the world which does something useful, requires almost zero maintenance, and runs daily on production servers. A lot of it is just the kind of makeshift stuff that dws is talking about, I think. That stuff doesn't grow. It just runs and no one touches it because they don't want anything to break.

Part of the problem is that you can't know in advance which software will need to grow in functionality, need to be rewritten or need to be maintained.

It's generally best to assume that the software will need to be maintained and that you should code with that in mind.

How many times have you been stuck in a quagmire, fixing something that should have been built better in the first place? I know I have, many a time. In at least some of those cases, I know the original author never dreamed that this particular piece of software would be used so long, or other software would become so dependent on it when they implemented their "makeshift". I know this because I was that original author.

In most of the cases when I wasn't the original author, I strongly suspect the original author didn't foresee the future maintenance.


In reply to Re: Re: Re: Simplicity vs. Doing It Right by jordanh
in thread Simplicity vs. Doing It Right by dws

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post; it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
    <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
  • Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
  • Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.
Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others browsing the Monastery: (4)
As of 2024-03-29 05:45 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found