18 Dec
2020
18 Dec
'20
midnight
On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 10:57:13AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 8:50 AM Larry McVoy
<lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
Most old guys get it. But my guys were seasoned and still would try and
slip stuff in.
I think it is part of being really smart, it's a puzzle for them and they
"win" if they can do something clever. I always replied "It is write
once,
read many. Optimize for reads". It's depressing how much of my job was
pounding that message home year after year.
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.