We all write shitty code.
This seems like a stupidly bold statement from a random person, especially when this person very likely writes shitter stuff than most others. After all, there’s a well known joke across the industry - that is, Jeff Dean does not write buggy code, and when he does, it’s the problem of the compiler. So at least we have one counter example.
In common sense, masters don’t write shit, and Linus Torvalds very likely nods in the line.
Well, technically speaking, before we criticize this non sense bold statement, we need to define what shit is. And here, I think shitty code is anything that does not live up to the expectation. Buggy code is shitty - because it doesn’t provide consistently correct results when people expect it to. However, in the real world, we tend to operate at a much higher level - we care more about contracts, functionalities, and behaviors, and less about the exact implementations. For example, when we use an API service, we tend to care about what features it can provide, the QPS it can support, and how easily we can use it - in essence, our expectation. We probably won’t care about whether it’s run on bare metal or some public cloud, whether the memory is manually managed, by compiler, or by garbage collection.
Does that then mean all services/software that fail to match expectation start with shitty code? Well not necessarily. Windows 9x was great at the time it was first introduced and enabled a whole industry. Yet as things evolved, a lot of the design issues started to get exacerbated and it eventually got completely replaced by NT kernel. I’m not trying to defend 9x and saying it was very well designed masterpiece by any means - it had some notorious kernel safety issues after all, but just using it as an example to show that even if some software had highlights, over time other factors could expose the shittiness inside - it’s just a matter of time. What I believe is that no matter how well the systems were designed and implemented at the beginning, they deteriorate over time. We cannot prevent things from turning into shit - we can only slow down the speed.
What makes things more complicated is that, often times, there are way too many factors that have impact on how we value software:
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