{"id":14381,"date":"2014-10-28T11:48:47","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T16:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=14381"},"modified":"2014-10-28T11:49:41","modified_gmt":"2014-10-28T16:49:41","slug":"things-you-should-never-do-part-i-joel-on-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=14381","title":{"rendered":"Things You Should Never Do, Part I &#8211; Joel on Software"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>There&#8217;s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: <i>they are probably wrong.<\/i> The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center; font-size: 120%; font-weight: bold;\">It\u2019s harder to read code than to write it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/articles\/fog0000000069.html\">Things You Should Never Do, Part I &#8211; Joel on Software<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it&#8217;s like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into those two characters.<\/p>\n<p>When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=14381\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1091],"tags":[984,283],"class_list":["post-14381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-coding-practices","tag-tech-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14382,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14381\/revisions\/14382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}