Joel on Software - Excerpt from “Things you Should Never Do, Part I”: It’s harder to read code than to write it. - Fortune [possible satire]

There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:

It’s harder to read code than to write it.

AuthorJoel Spolsky
WorkThings you Should Never Do, Part I
Published2008-07-04