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Old Code Gets Younger Every Year. The threat of decaying technology looms, by Marianne Bellotti (medium.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/programming@programming.dev

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Archive link: https://archive.ph/A7LI4

Marianne Belotti has worked at large institutions with modernizing decades-old code bases. She is author of the book "Kill it with Fire" [review].

From that book's author bio:

Marianne Bellotti has worked as a software engineer for over 15 years. She built data infrastructure for the United Nations to help humanitarian organizations share crisis data worldwide and tackled some of the oldest and most complicated computer systems in the world as part of United States Digital Service. At Auth0 she ran Platform Services, a portfolio that included shared services, untrusted code execution, and developer tools. Currently she runs Identity and Access Control at Rebellion Defense. She can be found on most social networks under the handle bellmar.

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[–] Solumbran@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Messy code by humans generally isn't logical because it went through multiple modifications/deletions that are not visible anymore.

I'm not sure that bad devs are much better than AIs, and they're the ones using them to code now. I think the problem stems from not giving a shit about code making sense, and AIs just increase the problem.

I mean, I saw code that was essentially saying things like "if True == False" and when asking about what the purpose of the block was to the original dev (who wasn't even such a bad dev), they just had no idea. Humans are chaotic and nonsensical and messy code comes from that, not from a weird logic, and you can't comprehend it most of the times because it's a mix of confusion, lack of planning, mistakes and laziness.