In my project there has been this guy who produced more lines of code than most other. All of his code is terribly convoluted mess no one can work with. Also buggy and slow as hell. It’s been many years since he left the company, and the negative effects are still seen today.
Luckily we’ve been able to detach ourselves from the worst parts.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It reminds me of the quote, “if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter”. Terse code is often better, because it is often developed using a process that only adds necessary things or was disambiguated during the development process.
Lengthy code is often written because a person coded their misunderstandings, their ambiguities about the problem space, and their early failures at solving the problem into the code.
magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 2 days ago
True. However, in this case I believe this guy just had a weird admiration for complexity.
AA5B@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Complexity or “complexity”? A couple months ago I had to accept a merge from a junior developer that is now flagged as the code with the highest complexity in my code base. It was in Groovy and he must have just discovered closures. Instead of breaking up the code in nice modular testable blocks, it was massive methods hundreds of lines long, and the most egregious use of closures
magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 2 days ago
Not necessarily closures, but it involved many dynamically generated lists of lambdas hidden under many layers of abstraction.