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Comment by bschmidt1 | Hacker News Reader

Is code more like poetry or more like a recipe? If the former, then yes we should be allowed the time and space to craft the highest syntactic art imaginable. But if it's the latter, it should just be quick, correct, readable, and extensible.

If it's art - how dare you ruin my masterpiece?

If it's business - we had a solution deployed for the customer in less than an hour.

If syntax (poetry) is your #1 take your time. If money is your #1 you wouldn't call it "crappy code" at all. Even code that is not as performant as it could be is only "crappy" if it's affecting the bottom line (which it often does). But so-called bad code that is yielding higher profits, hard to call crappy.

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It is you who starts to talk about 'art' en 'poetry' but these words do not come from what you are reacting to. One thing you seem to assume is that the 'crappy code' works and therefore the concerns about its crappiness must be about irrelevant things like 'art' or 'poetry'. However, the working of what I would consider crappy code is generally highly tenuous. There has not been found a bug, YET...., but one difference between crappy code and good code is that in crappy code one is quite sure there are lurking many bugs that are just waiting for the right circumstances to occur in practice. Also when bad code is changed, this is a much riskier affair because it is difficult to be sure that no unwanted side-effects were introduced.

There is a hypothesis that the crappy code was faster to write. At some point, this becomes false because one also has to spend time fixing the bugs. I would wager that this duration is measured in weeks, rather than months. From which it follows that the picking crappy code for speed is actually foolish and lowers profits for all but the most simple projects.

> must be about irrelevant things like 'art' or 'poetry'

If by "bad code" you mean something related to syntax, convention, or code that "might have bugs" (wtf), there is still a case it's actually "good code" if it's more readable, was a quicker solution that yields higher profits, is a less error prone approach to the larger management of the codebase albeit less performant etc.

> one difference between crappy code and good code is that in crappy code one is quite sure there are lurking many bugs

Sounds too superficial/judgmental and not evidence-based. If there is a bug there is a bug. Even perfectly written code to the best possible standard can still be code that does the wrong thing.

Poor architecture/design make code unmaintanable, or at least very expensive to maintain.

I would rather have my junior spend 3 more days to understand the FSM we use to handle our front before changing anything than him adding 2 random useState an a random useEffect because it just works.

How you handle your data is also very telling of the code quality. I'm not against the "write shit fast, fix later", it is in fact how i do my stuff, but once i have a functioning prototype and basic mocks, i then spend a long time in my models.xxx file because modeling data is like 30% of the job.

I have an example of bad data modelling: your object (that is a data representation) have fields that in certain case will be empty and you know it. Some people will ignore them. In 90% of the cases, this is a mistake that will lead to mistake down the lane. If you can use discriminated unions and don't because "it's faster" (it takes literally 2 minutes to do), you are probably writing bad code. It's not about idiomatic or not following conventions (those help) or not typing your data, it's about bad modeling choices.

> I would rather have my junior spend 3 more days to understand the FSM we use to handle our front before changing anything than him adding 2 random useState an a random useEffect because it just works.

React hooks obsoleted most use of state management tools years ago (there is even a native useReducer now so you don't have to install Redux just for that), especially if they're using SSR (Next.js) where state management has been moved to the server. There are still some cases for installing a global state management library in the FE, but usually useState / useEffect and custom hooks is enough for most React projects.

The problem is you came up with a heuristic in your mind that "global state management is pro, useState is amateur" but that isn't true.

Lets use a real example: If I worked on your team and pushed a <LoginForm /> component that captured email/pass with useState, you would tell me to move the username and password to a global state management library? Why? Dogma? It would be the wrong call.

We don't use Redux and use useReducer.

A Login page is typically a page that if you don't use a FSM, i will make you redo your work. How do you handle MFA? Errors, including network errors since we work with offshore stations that don't have the most stable connexions? I don't see a single way using a handful of states wouldn't result in poor code. What do you do if a new oidc provider will be used? Or if we migrate to AWS and use cognito, what states should you remove, what should you add? How to you order the rendering?

Nah, if you don't want to reuse our hooks and functions that's fine, but you need a decent architecture, and using a handful of state is not it, especially not for a login page. As long as you have a process to follow in the component, not using a reducer will hurt you and the maintainability (we avoid putting business logic on the front-end to be fair, but sometimes you have no choice). And simple component that just display shit (thus don't need a reducer) aren't often given to juniors are this part of the job is uninteresting and quick to do for non-juniors. We tend to do a lot more backend and ops than front anyway.

Didn't say MFA, said state of username / password (useState is fine for that).

Also said "use hooks", not "don't use hooks" and never said don't re-use functions.

Would hate to be on that team, I bet those PRs are brutal.

Exactly what I meant to say, as soon as you have to add complexity, just adding useState over and over breaks, and that's what I call bad code.

It's fine if it's just a get in a component out of the way, we do not use a reducer to print our 'about' page, but typically the login is where a lot of logic has to happen.

I think I misunderstood your comment, you talked about a global manager and I thought you talked about our library.

And since we pair/mob program often enough (10 hours a week roughly, per affinity or when someone ask for help), our PR meetings are more a way to show off to the whole team a new idea or present library upgrades, but it's true that we are quite brutal, especially when i compare with my previous job where I worked with Indians and north Americans, I think it is cultural though.

> so-called bad code that is yielding higher profits, hard to call crappy

Missing the point of the person you're replying to entirely... Yes you can get higher profits with shittier code, just as you can by building shittier airplanes, cars, bridges, etc. The consequences being exploits, hacks, 737MAX, Ford Pinto, etc

I think you missed the point that it wouldn't actually be shittier code in that case.

Some ugly 4 space indented, wrong kind of loops, old Node version, mongo as the main db, no linter, callback hell SaaS platform in 1 file called "server.js" could still be more reliable and yield higher profits and sooner than your masterpiece in Rust.

Yes, and then your user's personal details go on a darkweb leak.

But who cares! You made bank and no law or liability will actually punish you for it, so what the hell.

No need for a dark web, Twitter and GitHub have both leaked user passwords stored in plain text on their own platforms right here on the corporate web.

Twitter who struggled to turn a profit (but not to pay its investors who became wildly rich off it) hired artists who chose technology like Ruby on Rails. They should have hired capitalists who breathed jQuery and ate pieces of sh*t like Active Record for breakfast

I have found that "it depends" is an almost universal solvent for all technical quandaries.

I have found in my experience (and I have a lot of that), that the search for "One Solution To Rule Them All" is a snipe hunt. You can't get there from here.

It always (in my experience) comes down to context[s].

That "[s]" is important. There's the current context, and then, there is the future context.

You survived your baptism in fire to live to keep delivering software.

That's great. It's crap software that got you here.

Time to rewrite it, so we now have software with a future

Right?

OK?

That's what we'll do...right?

Oh, for Cthulhu's sake, what do you mean we need to keep building on our foundation of sand?

Congratulations. You now not only have technical debt; you have technical bankruptcy, coming down the road.

Better sell the company fast, before the bomb goes off...

The mythical "later" never happens. Today we need to get version 1.0 to the market ASAP. Tomorrow we will need to get version 2.0 to the market ASAP. Etc.

It's like people who promise that they will stop smoking later. Twenty years later, they usually still smoke. Twenty years later, if the software still exists, all the technical debt tickets will probably still be in the backlog.

> If it's business - we had a solution deployed for the customer in less than an hour.

Boeing was good at finding cheaper solutions to business problems as well. In the end it's society that suffers for our tolerance of late stage capitalism.

There is no "right" answer to this. But tolerating crappy engineering because it's cost effective seems like an admission of defeat to people that actually want to make things better. It's not so much letting perfect be the enemy of good enough; it's more about the steady decline in quality because that's what we incentivize.

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