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Comment by chrisaycock | Hacker News Reader

That comment on your blog is exactly what professional programmers do in the real world: pass the test suite and move on. After all, the goal of software engineering isn't to write elegant code; it's to deliver software that solves the customer's needs. And the customer's needs are tracked via the spec, not the style guide.

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Apart from the issue that we're talking about an introductory CS course, the greater problem remains that you'll only load up "technical debt", which may well lead to problems later on.

Michael O.Church briefly talks about this in his article on startup culture: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-yo...

Also, see the recent HN post, "Ask HN: I just inherited 700K+ lines of bad PHP. Advice?": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4557919

Lastly, in my article I highlight Open Office, which still has comments in German in its source code.

This is a short term attitude that is incompatible with building a system that grows mor ppwerful or a decade. That may be OK or maybe not, depending on your horizon and sunset plans.

IME it's not that binary.

In our corporate environment we do enough to pass the tests, with one extra 'test' being a peer review which should take into account a list of criteria that aren't easy to check for automatically; house code style, test code coverage, future maintainability, g11n/i18n-ness, etc.

We often only go as far as 'just good enough' but the standard to which that is assessed is pretty high.

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