7 Decomposition
No one deliberately decides to write legacy code. Code bases gradually deteriorate.
Why is that? Everyone seems to understand that a file with thousands of lines of code is a bad idea; that methods spanning hundreds of lines are difficult to work with. Programmers suffer when they have to work with such code bases.
If everyone understands that, though, then why do they allow the situation to become so bad?
7.1 Code Rot
Code gradually becomes more complicated because each change seems small, and no one pays attention to the overall quality. It doesn’t happen overnight, but one day you realise that you’ve developed a legacy code base, and by then, it’s too late to do anything about it.
At the beginning, a method has low complexity, ...
Get Code That Fits in Your Head: Heuristics for Software Engineering now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
