Writing software is hard

Posted previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13266506

I'd amend the title to read "writing maintainable software is hard."

I currently work on a codebase, primarily written in C++ targeting embedded. There's an overwhelming amount of technical debt. There are literally comments in certain critical methods saying "//DO NOT MODIFY", because nobody knows what the method actually does. Don't get me started on the maintainability headaches involved with the massive amount of inline ASM.

I have extremely intelligent people on my team. PhDs and patent holders. It becomes problematic when someone who's an expert in MATLAB attempts to translate her code into C++.

Keep in mind, this codebase is used by millions of people across the globe.

/rant

If it was easy, we probably wouldn't be making so much money :)