IMS_Blog

Editing code written by someone else is always tricky, especially when it wasn’t written as part of a team but as a fairly individual ad hoc effort. When it’s in a language you only half understand it certainly doesn’t help. What makes it really difficult, though, is when it’s simply poorly written. Not just a lack of comments (I sort of expect that really—I’m even pretty guilty of it myself) but why use some sort of subroutine or function when you can have the same block of lines three or four times in different places doing exactly the same thing. And that lack of modulisation also helps to make everything so entrenched it’s bloody difficult to change. if I hadn’t a thesis to write (and yes, that’s why I’m playing with this code) I’d rewrite the whole thing from scratch I’m that sick of it. Time does not allow however, so I hack on, growling.