Author: Michael Offel 2011-07-12 22:50:48
Published on: 2011-07-12T22:50:48+00:00
In a thread discussing the Bitcoin code, Mike Hearn suggests a complete rewrite of the code base inspired by the old code instead of moving around the functional code. He references an essay by Joel Spolsky about the axiom that nearly all programmers consider their code to be "a big hairy mess". While he agrees with most points in the essay, he disagrees on two points. The first being that large C++ projects can still have clean and nice code bases. The second point is that starting from scratch does not always lead to better results than the first attempt. Mike argues that a rewrite of the Bitcoin client with three or four people would be like a tiny rewrite in a real-world application like Word. He believes rewriting Bitcoin would be better since the first version was hacked together by far less programmers and contains unreadable code.
Updated on: 2023-05-26T19:21:39.939980+00:00