Skip to content

Comment on New term to describe bad programming: Biological

Comments

-> "A good developer would never put the end of the digestive system right next to the start of the reproduction system - not even if that would require fewer lines of code (which it undoubtedly did)."

Whatever point he's trying to make in this post - and I'm not going to take the time to try to figure it out - I'm sure there's a simpler way of saying it.

Basically, "biological" describes a system that works decently, and which has grown through incremental changes, and yet is a poorly architected mess inside. It describes something that appears to be great from the way it works and the way it looks on the outside, even if the internals are a mess that require 10 years of schooling and residency to fully understand and maintain ;)

Not even that! 10 years and continual refresher courses and on-the-job training for a lifetime -- just to have an inkling and at best a hazy but uncanny knack for fixing. But even this is not even enough in all cases.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.