
"Since I left my job at Amazon I have spent a lot of time reading great source code. Having exhausted the insanely good idSoftware pool, the next thing to read was one of the greatest game of all time:
Duke Nukem 3D and the engine powering it named 'Build'. It turned out to be a difficult experience: The engine delivered great value and ranked high in terms of speed, stability and memory consumption but my enthousiasm met a source code controversial in terms of organization, best practices and comments/documentation. This reading session taught me a lot about code legacy and what helps a software live long." Hail to the king, baby.
Member since:
2005-11-29
Yeah, some of the worst, creakiest, ugliest legacy code I've had the unfortunate job of maintaining is code written by people who think exactly like you.
Code should adhere to good design, period. This isn't about legacy code, or compatibility. The code would be written in the present, and as such, good design could be encouraged from the start.
The goal is to reduce substantially the amount of said ugly code, all while increasing the reliability and maintainability of the code base as a whole.
As a company often we don't control how old code is designed, we do control new code.