Five Lines of Code

13 Make bad code look bad

This chapter covers

• Understanding the reasons to separate good and bad code
• Understanding the types of bad code
• Understanding the rules to make code worse safely
• Applying the rules to make bad code worse

At the end of the last chapter, we discussed the advantage of clarifying the quality expectation for code at a glance. In the context of optimization, we did so by putting the code in an isolated namespace or package. In this chapter, we study how to make the quality level clear by making bad code look bad at a glance, a process we will call anti-refactoring.

We begin by discussing why anti-refactoring is useful, first from a process perspective and then from a maintenance perspective. Having established the motivation, ...