Not all of us are lucky to work with greenfield projects; the majority end up working with codebases that we inherit. These codebases have had their share of modifications that moved them away from the original elegant design: bug fixes, feature additions, and enhancements that were done in a hurry because of delivery pressure, without regard to code hygiene and future maintainability. The code then feels heavy, complex, hard to understand and more painful to maintain. There are a lot of ways to characterize code complexity, but the one that jumps to mind is "cyclomatic complexity" described by the McCabe paper from 1976 http://www.literateprogramming.com/mccabe.pdf . The paper describes how to measure the cyclomatic complexity of different program control paths, and recommends a bound of 10 for manageable code complexity. NIST also selects the same number http://hissa.nist.gov/HHRFdata/Artifacts/ITLdoc/235/chapter2.htm . The numbers, despite being arbitrary, provide...
Musings about technology and life in general.