A thought has just re-occured to me. About a month ago I was discussing new staff with a gentleman who worked in both the capacity as HR and legel representative of a company. His comment was that whenever somebody started in IT, he could guarantee for the first week they would be shaking their heads and telling the world how badly the code was that they had just inherited. I remembered doing the same thing myself in January.

I also remember reading an article on Netscape loosing the browser war (Joel on Software), that blamed the decision to rewrite the code from scratch. The article, quite correctly, stated that as the development team grew larger, the new developers would look at a piece of code with all these ugly statements in it that did wierd and wonderful things, but they didn't know why. Yet this ugliness was really all the bugfixes. The ones that made the code work on this OS or with that device driver. They threw it all away. They fell foul of one of the IT rules that they don't teach you at University, or in many books. It's harder to read code than to write it.

So now here I am and I am looking at some slightly ugly code, and I have half a page of things I would do differently, but I'm not going to throw away whats there. I am going to work out what it is trying to do.