
The Best Code Is No Code - mooreds
https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/04/01/the-best-code-is-no-code/
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mig4ng
I love to code and create new things yet the more I learn and grow the more I
agree with this article.

For personal projects and hobbies it might make sense to code more and do
random stuff, that is how we learn and sometimes how new libraries emerge. Yet
for enterprise applications just use other tools that are ready and whatever
gets the job done, even if it is a paid SaaS, because most of the times it
will be cheaper than developing in house anyways.

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mooreds
It's the old "what is core to the business" question. Which is a strategic
question, but one that everyone benefits from thinking about.

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ncmncm
Somehow everybody agrees with this, yet it is extremely rare to find anybody
deleting much code. If not writing code is good, deleting code should be much
better. At least, delete the code that shouldn't have been written!

Me, I never feel quite so productive as when I have deleted 1000 lines of
code. Sometimes I need to replace it with 20 or 100 lines, which is sad, but
still a net improvement. Yet, most days I find I write more code than I
delete.

There is a current fashion in C++ to eliminate loops from your code, replacing
them with calls to generic algorithms -- written on the spot, if necessary. It
is hard to see how this will be an improvement when you start, but after a
series of minor transformations, the improvement accelerates and code just
starts to seem to evaporate.

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droptablemain
Ehhh, I have an issue with black boxes. Yes, custom code creates a technical
debt; so does code written by someone else.

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mooreds
Ha, we're having a discussion on that internally. It's a question of which
unpleasant choice do you want?

* maintain my own code and pay interest on my technical debt

* pay someone else, hope that their interface and business remain stable

~~~
droptablemain
Pretty much!

