You could almost replace Perl by "any language of your choice" and the above meditation would still be valid. In my view Perl is still youthful enough to suffer from 'flavour of the month' syndrome. Inexperienced coders use Perl to produce badly written (through no fault of their own) code, skilled coders in other languages write Perl code but so heavily flavoured by their 'native' language that it is difficult to understand/maintain.

Perhaps what you should do is:
a) rewrite where possible and practicable
b) or comment and correct if not
c) or if none of the above apply then post warning notices and retire a safe distance

The best legacy you can leave for those that follow you is your own code that is clear/succinct/understandable... Don't worry too much about the mess that you inherit - it wasn't your fault and it probably isn't your job to sort it out - just make sure that you don't add to it or make it worse. Odud

In reply to RE: Code Maintenance by Odud
in thread Code Maintenance by agoth

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



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.