Good to see the Aussie vegemite sandwich quote coming from someone who I'd always assumed lives in Europe! :)
Nothing to add except a few more quotes for light relief (mostly lifted from here).
Gabriel's pragmatic habitability quote below resonates the most with me.
The perl5 internals are a complete mess. It's like Jenga - to get the
perl5 tower taller and do something new you select a block somewhere in
the middle, with trepidation pull it out slowly, and then carefully
balance it somewhere new, hoping the whole edifice won't collapse as
a result.
-- Nicholas Clark
The problem isn't an infrastructure issue, however -- and speaking as one of the handful
of people who've had a hand in developing the site's software: It's our own gosh-darn fault.
Perlmonks is WAY more complex than when it originally launched.
It does a crapload of perl evals and sql queries per page.
It's vulnerable to resource hogs. Searching can cripple the database.
And right now, I don't think we're gonna fix these problems any time soon.
... It's not a matter of computer resources, as much as human engineering resources.
-- Re: perlmonks too slow by nate (original co-author of the Everything Engine)
"It's harder to read code than to write it" (Joel Spolsky) - writing something new is cognitively less demanding (and more fun) than the hard work of understanding an existing codebase ... which might explain the typical exchange below :)
Developer: The project I inherited has weak code, I need to rewrite it from scratch
Boss: Will there ever be an engineer who says, the last guy did a great job, let's keep all of it?
Developer: I'm hoping the idiot you hire to replace me says that
-- Green Vs Brown Programming Languages
Habitability is the characteristic of source code that enables programmers,
coders, bug-fixers, and people coming to the code later in its life to understand its
construction and intentions and to change it comfortably and confidently.
Habitability makes a place livable, like home. And this is what we want in software --
that developers feel at home, can place their hands on any item without
having to think deeply about where it is.
It's something like clarity, but clarity is too hard to come by.
-- Richard Gabriel's Patterns of Software
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
-- famous Einstein misquote