Even a chimp can write code

Friday, January 21, 2005

Are you afraid your coding legacy would be tarnished?

I was talking with some colleagues and one of them complained about how some code he had written a while back -- and was rather proud of -- was being updated and converted to spaghetti by developers currently maintaining it. Now I've had the very same thought before and so I can empathize with him.

We toil to create beautiful code using all our means and faculties and proudly (some of us do!) add our name as authors. Everything we write is consigned to posterity. It is our legacy. As if to proclaim, "I solved this problem!". But sometimes it isn't easy to detach oneself from one's creations. Just like parents never tire from worrying about their children's new-found errant ways, it breaks our hearts to see our code handled by chimps.

Oh, we are so full or ourselves.

Email this | Bookmark this