Darren New wrote:

> The two problems are these:
> 
> (1) You don't always know it's ugly when you write it.

Hell yeah. Usually I write a program, eventually get it to almost-work, 
and then realise that the way I structured it was totally stupid and 
there's actually a far better way to do the job. Delete, start again. 
Depending on program complexity, it can take a few iterations to get 
this right.

It seems to be that, regardless of which programming language you use, 
figuring out the best way to divide the problem into abstractions is 
absolutely *critical* to writing clean, efficient, maintainable code. 
And it's often not very obvious which way *is* the best until you try to 
actually "do it".

> (2) Ugliness depends on both program size and complexity and the number 
> of people working on the code.

I have no experience of working with other programmers. The only group 
programming project I've ever been involved with was at uni - and I was 
the only person in the group who knew how to program.

Program complexity I can agree with... ;-)

> Indeed. Generally, I wind up fixing ugly when it gets to be more effort 
> to work around the ugly than it does to fix the ugly.

This seems like it's only common sense.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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