alt Hacker NewsI wonder if we will trend towards a world where maintainability is just a waste of time and money, when you can just knock together a new flimsy thing quicker and cheaper than maintaining one thing over multiple iterations.
Replies
killingtime74 • yesterday at 6:57 AM
I don't think most business processes can afford to have that many issues with their code. Customers and contracts will be lost. Reputations will be lost
skydhash • yesterday at 4:40 AM
I don’t think that will ever be true. Let’s take a shell session as an example of ad-hoc code: People are still writing programs and scripts. Stuff doesn’t really change that often to warrant starting from scratch. Easier to add a new format to a music player than writing a new player from scratch.
Without maintainability, adding a new type of input or feature will break existing features.
Doesn’t matter how quick it is to write from scratch, if you want varying inputs handled by the same piece of code, you need maintainability.
In a way, software development is all about adding new constraints to a system and making sure the old constraints are still satisfied.