I’ve been doing some maintenance programming for a few days solid (rare for me to get to program that much), and I again find myself amazed that any software works at all. I’ve only been programming seriously for about a decade (mostly web apps), but it feels like I’m building rickety crap on top of other people’s horrible hacks.
The bar for quality software seems so abysmally low. When coding around some bizarre behavior I’m seeing out of the .NET framework, I know I’m introducing weird brittle bits. It feels wrong, but I don’t see any other option. And this is new code, written for the latest released version of a very popular system! It seems like everyone else is doing the same thing in every programming environment I’ve seen.
My best guess is I’m working at maybe the 1000th layer of abstraction over the bare metal, and that sounds low. That’s a lot of cruft, hacks, bugs, security holes, late-night fixes, bad compromises and coffee.
Maybe my sense of “clean code” is just OCD? Sometimes I wonder if writing good code is just a waste of time. Is shoddy copy/paste winning the evolutionary battle for the software base that will drive humanity for the next millennium?