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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

Code is not "a liability".

It is a tool that can be used masterfully or utterly abused.

Every craftsman has to invest in their tools. And for someone to truly master their craft they must sometimes hone their tool skills speculatively, without short-term gain, and by sacrificing the time and attention used for other things, like actual projects.

If everyone just obeyed their project manager and always focused 100% on the problem at hand, we would be producing sad, boring things. If you want to see what that's like look at enterprise applications.

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Code absolutely is a liability. It is not a tool, it's a means to an end.

A simple tool, like a hammer, is not volatile over time. The house that you build with your tools is. It will weaken and rot, and given enough time it will crumble. It takes care and maintenance to keep it safe to live in.

It is the same with code in production; at some point in time in the future, through no fault of your own, the code can become "wrong" as reality changes around it.

Code is also costly to maintain, sometimes even for small code bases. As the world changes, so must the code.

One of the definitions of "liability" in the Merriam-Webster dictionary [0] is "a feature of someone or something that creates difficulty for achieving success". This definition is often met by code.

[0] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/liability

Strictly speaking, code is both an asset and a liability (as in double entry book keeping, you can’t have one without the other). It depreciates over time.

A simple tool like a hammer is rarely treated like an asset as it is expensed up front.

Code can generate cash flow through its replication and exchange, or its application. Whether this is higher than its depreciation and maintenance costs determines whether you’re losing money on it.

The above is an analogy of course, In actual financial accounting we typically see only see code or “knowledge capital” on the books after acquiring another company, usually as a fat chunk of “goodwill”.

> It is not a tool, it's a means to an end.

You could almost call it "something (such as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation."[0]

[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tool

If you are going to use my own trick and use the same dictionary against me, at least have the common decency to also use my own words against me!

Definition 1C in the link you provided lists "a means to an end" as a definition of a tool, which I explicitly mentioned code was.

So I must concur, code is a tool. But I'm adamant that it is also a liability.

It may not be sexy, but a good chunk of civilization runs on sad, boring enterprise applications. I for one am proud to build apps that are useful enough that businesses are willing to spend a large amount of effort and money to use them. Even if they are so ugly that they occasionally cause users’ eyeballs to bleed.

Code is absolutely a liability. Every line written must now be maintained which incurs an ongoing cost.

What was missing in the gp comment is that code is also an asset. The goal is to have the value of the asset greater than the liability. This ratio changes over time given a multitude of factors like problem domain and how well the original code was written.

Agreed. A favorite quote: “[E]verybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

For a long time, my bias was to write code when faced with a problem, without realizing the debt I was taking on and the other solutions available.

https://www.nemil.com/on-software-engineering/dont-write-cod...

In the real world with limited resources, limited skills, limited budgets and limited brain power, yes code is a liability. Not only a liability, but a liability among other things.

>In the real world with limited resources, limited skills, limited budgets and limited brain power, yes code is a liability.

That's an unbalanced conclusion. Code can be a liability but it can also be an asset.

Do we have limited resources? Maybe writing new code can help. E.g. In cars, the electronic fuel injectors have computer code determining the optimal amount of gas to inject to minimize fuel usage. Fuel efficiency is improved over older "non-computer-code" carburetors. Computer code is an asset that's equivalent to discovering new proven oil reserves.

How about the limited resource of bandwidth on networks? Code and algorithms like h.264/h.265 that shrinks video enough to make it practical to stream to homes maximizes the existing network without having to lay a bunch of new fiber optic cables to every house.

And consider all these YC companies that aren't worth much today. How do they become more valuable? They need to write more code. New features that customers find valuable requires coding. Even if the startup's code does not have patents, it will still be part of the tech portfolio assets that the acquiring company will include in the purchase.

The "code is a liability" seems to be true if one limits their focus to negative situations like npm leftpad and the Boeing MCAS accidents. In contrast, I don't think the astronauts thought the Apollo Guidance Computer was a liability if it helps them get to the moon.

Code may be necessary to write software, but it's still a liability. All else being equal, accomplishing a task in n lines of code is worse than accomplishing it in n - 1 lines.

That's where those aphorisms come from. No code runs faster than no code! No code has fewer bugs than no code! No code is easier to understand than no code!

We all know that. We are not arguing with that. We all understand that code is always written to solve a problem or make something more efficient, or create a new functionality. In that way it is most of the time an asset. That is a given. What we are talking about is a higher-level view which you get from a lot of experience in big codebases and big projects, in which code is almost always also a liability. It means that when you write a piece of code, the wise thing to do is to always assume that it will be a liability (in addition to all the wonderful things it does) to someone, in some situation, in some time. That way one can easier think through all the ways this liability can show itself, and thus somewhat mitigate those ways. Returning to original topic, choose a stable mature language/system which a lot of programmers know, instead of a new shiny one (even though the shiny one might be 5% more efficient in lins of code or something) - is a great way to reduce the liability surface in the future.

> That's an unbalanced conclusion. Code can be a liability but it can also be an asset.

maybe that's why he said:

> Not only a liability, but a liability among other things.

>maybe that's why he said: > Not only a liability, but a liability among other things.

It was my mistake then and I misinterpreted "among other things" to mean : "Code is not just a liability but it's a liability among the other things I just listed like limited resources and limited brainpower" instead of "Code is a liability among other things I won't say explicitly like code also being an asset".

Because I interepreted it the 1st way, I wanted to emphasize the opposite view: that limited brainpower is why code can be an asset to relieve humans from mundane boring calculations to redirect that precious brainpower to higher level creative thinking. Limited resources also motivates new code that can be an asset to expand those resources.

I can understand being confused by that wording, it wasn't the greatest. :)

Code is a liability; functionality is an asset.

If you want to spend time learning new tools, that’s fine. Don’t do it during a critical project. Don’t make your learning projects a liability for your colleagues.

Craftsmen are experts at applying a limited set of tools. That’s why they’re craftsmen. You hire them because they’re the best at doing the thing you hire them to do.

> My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

~ Dijkstra (1988) "On the cruelty of really teaching computing science" (EWD1036).

Exactly, if it was a liability, you would simply delete it, because unlike real liabilities, it's legal.

You don't delete it because it's a liability in the maintenance account but it's an asset in the features account.

So everything is a liability?

In the double entry bookkeeping sense that GP is using it, yes, everything is a liability. They’re also necessarily equal, which I think is where the disconnect between the analogy in the post and the analogy here comes from.

> If you want to see what that's like look at enterprise applications.

If you think that is an argument against enterprise, you might want to take another look. I spent the early part of my career in enterprise, then moved to startups that serve government customers. Every app I have ever written is boring. I've been working on one boring app for most of the last 7 years. 7-figure ARR, and acquired, but boring.

Yet I consider my career, and those apps, to be great successes.

Coding is a tool.

Code is the result of that tool. If you use a tool to build something you're constantly repairing/maintaining, then its a liability.

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