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RE[4]: Qt4 Interface?
by silix on Fri 18th Dec 2009 11:33 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Qt4 Interface?"
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"I speak as a developer who, when he has something new to build, goes out and finds somebody who has already done it, download the code and discover that it’s an ugly, unmaintainable, over-engineered mess that’s more effort to redesign and repurpose than to simply start from scratch.

[...] I wrote my own. I throw away and write my own—new and better—tool for almost every third party piece of code I come across.

I am sorry if this is too harsh, but this needs to be said if the case truly is what you describe above. It seems like you are not much of a developer.
as i learned in the field and from others in the field, the good developer is one who is able to write a workable solution, satisfying the requirements, in the least time possible, possibly conforming to coding conventions and maintaining code clarity throughout development (that is, assuming his code must and will be reused by others) and, last but not least, evaluating the best tools for the job, and this includes including the choice between an initial/inspirational codebase, and starting from scratch

this is because other people's code is a solution to other people's requirements, and the result of their development skills, mental process and coding style - so when a publicly available open source project works, but results from conventions and practices differing beyond a certain threshold (say, no unit tests because the programmer doesnt' know about them, or thinks he can do without them - or use convoluted constructs - and be forgiven because he is oh so l33t, or simply because he doesnt intend his code to be read and resused by others) there is an inevitable cost (in time, which when you develop commercially becomes money) associated with evaluating the codebase, learning its structure and understanding what the code does, and then (notice that at this point one has already spent some time) balancing it out against the option of starting from scratch (wich has has an obious disadvantage but, may be largely preferable)

if one takes an existing project made of messy code (maybe even written by duct tape programmers ( )) to spend 6 months developing into it in order to make the software do something alike to what he needs, and coming up with a 10% larger, but equally messy, codebase; how is he a better developer than someone who, after evaluating the above open source codebase, decides to start anew, and in 6 months is able comes up with a smaller but vastly cleaner (thus more easily expandable) C# code base, complete with unit tests and all, doing exactly what he needs with roughly the same performance?

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