Question

I client of mines do not care about elegant and well structured code. I am writing the applications from scratch with minimal 3rd party tools. I am using l2s, Recatcha, tinymce, lucene, and structure map.

I would like to quickly get the clients product to the market as fast as possible while sacrificing elegant code. Are there any tools out there that will enable me to rush the product to the market?

Answer 1

No client ever cares about elegant and well structured code. That’s not why you write elegant and well structured code. You write it because it’s shorter, simpler, it’s faster to write, contains fewer bugs and it is easier to find those bugs.

ADD: I know what I wrote above sounds contradictory. When I started working, I didn’t believe that either. I had to learn the hard way. So to make the point clearer: This is what typically happens when you don’t try to write elegant, well structured code:

• You’ll introduce subtle bugs that lead to weird, unreproducible behavior and take 10 times more time to find than writing the code in the first place
• You’ll solve the same problem multiple times. Or, the other way round: The elegant solution would have solved a set of problems while the ugly solution will only solve one problem. Or part of one problem.
• You’ll repeat yourself a lot. That means more code to write, more code to maintain, more bugs.
• You’ll write code that you don’t understand a week later. So instead of adding new features/solving bugs you’ll waste your time trying to figure out why some piece of code works (or doesn’t work)
• You’ll solve the wrong problems. This is by far the worst danger, and it happens too often if you try to save the time you need to plan the thing properly.