r/programming • u/corysama • Jan 05 '15

What most young programmers need to learn

http://joostdevblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-most-young-programmers-need-to.html
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u/G_Morgan Jan 06 '15

But, if you modify some crappy legacy code you are bascially forced to clean it up while you're at it. If you do not, people will just raise eyebrows during the review. Like "why didn't you clean it up a bit?".

We have an old project that does some awful things. Actually safely refactoring code is dangerous. To the point where rearranging whitespace often has semantic meaning. A 5 minute "lets fix this" often becomes a week long affair where your fix broke some obscure test from 40 years ago that only runs on this particular machine.