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What’s the first thing most developers say after diving into legacy code?It’s crap. Giant plate of spaghetti! What in the world was the person who wrote this thinking?What’s interesting is we ask this question without really trying to answer it. What were the objective and/or constraints to the person who wrote it? Without knowing this, you are making your judgement on unknowns. Example #1: You have 30 days to complete. This application is only assumed to be a temporary application. Example #2: You have 30 days to complete, but don’t spend more than 16 hours. This will be a legacy application. Time and legacy are important objectives/constraints that were given to example #1. Why practice programming to interfaces and create abstraction if you are writing throw away code? If you know you are writing legacy code, maintainability is going to be more important. We also often fail to acknowledge the technologies and practices that have changed. Look back at your own code from 6 months to a year ago. Do you catch yourself thinking:
I could of written this better by applying “X” pattern or following “X” principle?Don’t be so quick to judge at first glance, unless you know all the objectives.
The main ones for me are QB, freebasic, & C. I’ve been mliany programming C on linux lately. I know bits & pieces of many other ones as well. Essentially, the programming language is fairly irrelavent, in my opinion. Programming concepts & problem solving skills carry over to just about all languages and make it easy to pick up new ones.I’m not an aspiring programmer so I don’t really go deep into languages & computer science, just write basic programs that work for me. How’s computer engineering working out for you? I am studying electric engineering myself.