>Is it just me, or do you people think it's easier/faster to
>just write your own code than to try and figure out
>what another programmer is doing in his/her programs?
>
>I'm sure all of us here are well aware of "programming style."
>I've seen "code that matches my way of thinking," and
>"code that could _easily_ win 'The Obfuscated C programming
>Contest' -- HANDS DOWN! :^) -- held on the Usenet every year.
>
>Fortunately, a friend of mine and I have replaced some dewd that
>seems to think like we do, so reading his code isn't really all that
>difficult; however, it is very time consuming! What do you people
>think? Anyone else out there been/going through this? :^)

Well, there is always a reason why a request to enhance existing infrastructures would apply. And, when this happens, this is because the design has to be adjusted, a new framework is used, there are new employees doing additional tasks, it was time to expand the application, data normalization was applicable, etc.

And, whenever this is happening, we always find ourselves in the situation saying "Oh, I would have done that differently than what they did!". Well, it's just the way it is.

In many of them, some of those designs have been built at first with a minimum set of requirements. So, it was doing the job right. But, the company has expanded, the technology has moved on and the requirements kept coming in. So, after a while, the corporate people sat down and decided it was time to revamp the entire design. For most of my consulting, this is what I do. I don't work on existing code. I basically revamp the entire infrastructure by upscaling the application to actual technologies, implementating new development standards, doing data normalization and menthoring the team so they would be able to move on as soon as I finish my job.

But, in many situations, while analyzing existing code, yes, it is somewhat difficult to understand what is going on there. I found however that there is much more comments than it used to be. I also menthor that as well. The more you have in the code, the better it is. Having outside documentation is not pretty much welcome anymore other than the fact to provide the generic documentation on the naming convention, the framework and other related components. If you look at Rick Strahl's WWWC software, you will find a lot of comments. In some places, there is much more comments than lines of code. And, that is greatly welcome!