October 2, 2002
Lipstick
I have been working on some really nasty code. I'm doing my best to clean it up. I refer to this clean up work as 'putting lipstick on a pig'. But the problem is that this code just really wants to be ugly. It is in it's nature. I fought with it to clean it up, to make it readable by normal human beings, but it the scale of the effort was daunting.
I finally realized that I was having such a hard time because I was working against it's nature. Once I just ignored the mess and focused on the parts that I needed to fix, it all just worked. It's an unmaintainable mess, but it works.
The only problem is that now I have a hard time not showing my contempt for the original authors coding abilities. I'm a snob, I know.
Posted by ed at October 2, 2002 4:20 PM
Comments
Funny, I just used the "lipstick on a pig" line today. I told a friend that I don't bother with the frilly, pretty, Victoria's Secret things anymore because it's like after having two kids, it's like "putting lipstick on a pig."
Posted by: Linda at October 2, 2002 7:15 PM