MC: Ping-Pong Cubes

[David Hayden]

(05-27-2018 05:06 AM)Joe Horn Wrote:  Although discarding already-written code (and replacing it with better code) might be frustrating and expensive when developing commercial software, it tickles me pink when it happens while programming just for the fun of it.

I'm going a bit off topic here but I hope some readers might find this interesting.

Sometimes discarding code frustrating and expensive, but sometimes it's the best thing you can do. In the late 90's we totally rewrote a core piece of our software. It had grown into a mass of spaghetti code that was very hard to maintain and enhance. I think the real interesting thing about that project was that we needed that first implementation to truly understand the requirements of the program.

That rewrite is still going strong nearly 20 years after going online and through almost constant enhancement.

In another case, we deliberately wrote a piece of thow-away code. The throw-away couldn't handle the rapidly growing load that we anticipated, but it could be written and deployed quickly. It gave us time to write a more robust implementation that could handle the load which increased four orders of magnitude.

Dave