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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Code is inventory, not debt. Inventory is good and bad. If someone comes to your store and everything is out of stock, you will make $0. So you want some inventory. But if you have too much inventory and nobody is buying anything, then your inventory just rusts in storage and becomes worthless. Code is pretty much exactly the same. Most features are sitting in storage in the hopes that someone comes by to buy it. Sometimes they do! Sometimes they don't. If you were the guy with a toilet paper warehouse in March 2020 you did great.

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Code is an asset. Assets need to be managed, maintained, or else they will degrade. Assets have costs.

Gold bars don't need to be maintained and don't degrade. They just exist. That's the type of asset to own.

A white elephant needs a living are, food, elephant experts, vets, etc. That's much closer to the type of asset most code is.

I bet you five gold bars that five gold bars left "unmaintained" won't be there when you pop back in a year.

It's not a big thing and there's no need for us to fall out over this .. but gold bars are famous for requiring additional ongoing security costs.

Even just burying them in the desert isn't as secure as it used to be.

I'll take that bet for 5 unmaintained gold bars. If you win you get all 5. If I win you give me 1. I'll let you know when they are buried.

Hmmm.

You do realise that if I were to win then the five gold bars would be gone in the wind and you'd be ponying up for another five to pay out on the wager?

These are going to be small gold bars.

I understand what you’re trying to say with this analogy, but even gold bars have related costs, known as the cost of carry.

Gold bars in storage may not degrade, but code in storage doesn't degrade either. We know from context that we're talking about code put to use. Gold bars are quite prone to degradation when put to use as well.

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