“Software engineers suffer from not knowing what their code
should look like. The classic essay worse is better exemplifies
this – How can worse be better? Isn’t worse worse? Even more
confusingly, it’s generally referenced to claim the exact opposite
of what it’s trying to argue.”
“The problem is that people use very different, and often
antithetical, criteria to judge the ‘beauty’ of code. Clearly there
is a need for a measure of code quality which is more objective
than aesthetic.”
“I suggest that you judge code based on it’s
maintainability.”
“Truly maintanable code is flexible and can be taken in many
directions. Code is not more maintainable just because it has more
features – invoking functionality which is currently dormant is not
maintenance, it’s use. Maintenance is when you add new
functionality or change existing functionality. This is often done
long after the code was originally written and in a completely
unforseeable manner.”