Old Code Is a Mess

There’s a reason that programmers always want to throw away old code and start over: they think the old code is a mess. They are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it.

A close-up of a man with a restrained, uneasy smile appears beneath a statement about programmers wanting to discard old code. The joke is that code is easier to write than to understand later, so programmers mistake unfamiliarity and complexity for evidence that the old code is fundamentally bad.

• @dev_meme / 4190 2022-02-09