Code Craft

Believe the Impossible

Perhaps the reason we see so much bad code and so many dirty hacks is the mistaken belief that it takes longer to do the job properly. When you factor in the time spent debugging and the ease of making later modifications, this proves to be a false assumption. You may be able to close a single fault report quickly by hacking out a fix, but it’s not a good solution. True craftsmen take responsibility for what they do to code.

In the corporate world, there is often a management expectation of quick fixes. It’s reasonably easy to show a manager that a five-ton block of concrete stuck on top of a flimsily erected flagpole won’t stay up for verylong. It’s harder to make him stand underneath the thing. And it’s much harder to get ...