From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: imp at bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2020 10:57:13 -0700 Subject: [COFF] [SPAM] Re: [TUHS] Algol 68 and Unix (was cron and at ...) In-Reply-To: <20201217155039.GA13368@mcvoy.com> References: <0EA02917-243E-4612-9F7E-D370EE0A7C2E@ronnatalie.com> <20201217143558.GD13268@mcvoy.com> <20201217155039.GA13368@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 8:50 AM Larry McVoy wrote: > I told my people that it doesn't matter who wrote it 6 months from now, > even if it was you, you are going to have to relearn the code to fix a > bug in it. > This goes double or triple for open source. 6 months from now, the odds are 50/50 the original contributor is busy, unavailable at the moment or otherwise gone if it wasn't one of the current top 20 contributors. Clever is almost always wrong... It's only right if the code is performance critical and the cleverness gives better performance in a meaningful way. And even then the bias is against being too clever. Warner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: