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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

Curious when you've worked with write only code what was the language? I've been on like 30 different projects over the last 10 years and never encountered write only c#. But I have come pretty close to encountering write only javascript.

It seemed like static typing, "find all references" and the limited use of reflection style coding made the difference between bad code being annoying and completely unworkable.

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I second this rather strongly.. The harder it gets to "stop" and clean-up shit, the quicker it gets to just lose it.. Especially relevant in environments where the authors of the write-only codebase are not around anymore. Somehow it is hard to blame/hate someone you go out with for lunch or beers.

What really worked great for my teams in the past is to game the transition so that the team as a whole sees it as an internalized mission, usually much stronger than that of the company. Then killing X lines of code from the old mess and beautifying the codebase becomes a shared and extremely satisfying exercise

I've seen write-only Java where the design was fragmented over so many classes that nobody could really make a meaningful design change anymore. Classes with dozens of methods, gross violations of SOLID principles, etc. It seems entirely possible to do the same in C#.

That being said, languages in that space seem generally less prone to write-only code, so I'd agree that language choice has a big impact. Especially when an entirely novel language or framework enters the picture.

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