Messages in this thread |  | | From | "Henning P. Schmiedehausen" <> | Subject | Re: [linux-usb-devel] Re: [BK PATCH] USB changes for 2.5.34 | Date | Mon, 16 Sep 2002 11:16:49 +0000 (UTC) |
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Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com> writes:
>It's a sign of a naive programmer when you hear "this code is all shit" >and it's useful code. That means the programmer would rather rewrite >working code than understand it enough to fix it. Extremely common. >And extremely wrong in almost all cases. It's *hard* to understand code. >Get over it. Read the code, think, read again, think some more, keep >it up. Always always always assume the guy who came before you *did* >know what they were doing. Otherwise all you do is replace mostly working >code with brand new code that works for the *one* case in front of the >new programmer and none of the 100's of cases that the old code handled.
Once again. BS. 99% of the cases where I had to work on foreign code, it was a codebase where someone with a clue wrote something nice, and then lots of people without clue "improved" that code. Then I start to work on it and have to clean up the mess. First thing is that you want to everytime is, to _understand_ what the original author wanted to do with the code and what the clueless did to this idea. A debugger is a decent toy for this. commons-logging another.
Code which was written like you describe is never hard to understand. Clueful people know that they have to comment their "tricks".
Ask me about Bean-Setters with a return value. Now that's clever. =:-(
Regards Henning -- Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen -- Geschaeftsfuehrer INTERMETA - Gesellschaft fuer Mehrwertdienste mbH hps@intermeta.de
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