17 Dec
2020
17 Dec
'20
5:57 p.m.
On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 8:50 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I told my people that it doesn't matter who wrote
it 6 months from now,
even if it was you, you are going to have to relearn the code to fix a
bug in it.
This goes double or triple for open source. 6 months from now, the odds are
50/50 the original contributor is busy, unavailable at the moment or
otherwise gone if it wasn't one of the current top 20 contributors.
Clever is almost always wrong... It's only right if the code is performance
critical and the cleverness gives better performance in a meaningful way.
And even then the bias is against being too clever.
Warner