"There’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. […] 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." - Joel Spolsky

Ah, finally a programmer quote.

Everytime I read something like this I just want to scream:

"Then just write clean code from the start! "

This quote is just narcissistic and whiny to me.

@rant1ng I have to agree. There is code which young can write to be easy to look at. It's hard to keep that up though especially if your going back through and adding to it.

This is only vaguely true when dealing with someone else’s code, but I constantly do this with my own code that I understand fully because I wrote it and come up with a better design later.

I think we should be striving to always improve our software, not just stick with what works.

Also well-designed and well-abstracted software should allow you to refactor things without breaking other things that depend on it.

@devios1 exactly

Although, to be fair, I don't deal with other people's code all that much.

thank god.

@rant1ng Lucky.

@devios1 nope, planned.

I look for small projects in small niches that produce decent profits.

I taught myself marketing, ad copy, advertising, business, and programming.

I made that decision 20 years ago, when I was twenty, best thing I ever did.

Never had to deal with office politics, or other people's code :)

It happens all the time in computational science, when some computational chemistry PhD students wrote a program that barely worked and full of bugs. And one day someone took the code and tried to implement something on top of it, the poor bastard swore repeatedly...and the neighbours called the police :(