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Comment by huckfinnaafb | Hacker News Reader

There's good code, which is something that good products build their foundation on, and near perfect code, which can get in the way of building realistic solutions on time.

>Do you really need a full objet-oriented API right now? Do you really need to make a dozen interwoven classes, when it’s possible just a hundred or so lines in one class will do fine? Can you do all the same error checking and unit tests in a much smaller code base?

This is not necessarily "good code". That's code you think is good. Excessive or complex code is not good code, and I think the author should redefine his usage to what programmers sometimes perceive as good code.

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I was just about to post the same thing. I agree with the underlying thesis that a good shipping product is better than perfect code that never ships, but the author seems to be confusing good code and over-engineering.

Good code does exactly what it needs to, but will be maintainable and won't have to be thrown away when that "fantastic" product ends up getting popular.

I also tend to believe that doing it right doesn't necessarily take much longer. The code I write now is much better than the code I wrote 10 years ago for a number of reasons, but I still get a lot more done, and a lot faster than I did back then.

That's a great distinction. As you saw, the definition of 'good code' for this post was definitely based on the 'good code' remarks I hear from coworkers, where it is often the notion that more objects, bigger API's, etc., is 'good code' and a 100 line one-class add-on is 'bad code'. Great distinction though, thanks for bringing this up!

Do you really need to split your data into small pieces, when you can use global variables and have a code-base that eliminates the need for function arguments and complicated function invokation strategies in a much smaller code base?

While the fight for proper functions has been largely won thanks to unit testing, a lot of people think that the database gives them back the license to code against global state and believe a code-base should be judged by the number of keystrokes needed to type it.

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