Somebody Else's Code
[T]he truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
It’s easy to slag somebody else’s code. Sometimes it’s almost impossible not to. Nobody likes a big hairy mess, and if you’re the software development world’s equivalent of a neat freak, as I am, the reaction can be immediate and visceral.
Certainly not all code is great. I find good writing an apt comparison: styles differ, and reasonable people differ in their preferences, but there exist some pretty clearly-defined differences between good writing and bad. Books and articles are written to be read by humans, and good code should be too, but because code has a second, overarching goal of executability and functional completeness, the kinds of structure, syntax, and flow that are so important to a good book tend to fall by the wayside. In code, expressing intent to humans is nice; in writing, it’s everything. Not every line of code receives that kind of care and attention, and when you find yourself staring the kind of tangled mess that promises whole weeks of fun to tease apart it’s hard not to lay a finger of blame on its human stewards. I myself prefer a kind of good-natured mockery when I stumble across something particularly egregious and a have a good guess about the person1 (or, more likely when pairing, persons) responsible.
Even at ThoughtWorks, where we all like to think that we’re pretty decent coders2, I haven’t been thrilled with every line of code code I’ve stumbled across. I find the above quote helpful because, substituting ‘social institution’ for ‘line of code’, it points the way to humility: people generally do things for a reason, and they may be drawing from painful experience that you yourself haven’t had the benefit of, not to mention the kinds of tight deadlines that we’ve all been under before. Resist the urge to rip it all apart until you understand it well enough to approach it with respect and humility.
1 Sarnacke. Kidding! Or am I? Hmm.
2 On our writing I plead the fifth.