Get Back to Where We Started From
There are always these moments where I would like to delete the whole program I have written and just start anew. Of course given how much we have to do here with all the new programs needing to be written, this is more than out of the question.
It happens like this. I start to write the code and I try to stay as simple as possible. I even try to include commentaries so that whoever has to adjust the program later, gets an idea about what that variable is used for and what these lines do. Whoever in a lot of cases is me and believe me, once you haven’t worked on your code for only a few days, you don’t remember a thing about it. You think you would, but you don’t.
After a while new ideas come up and have to be worked into the code and that is the moment it all starts to go wrong. Which doesn’t mean that once it’s done the program won’t work. It will, only by then the code will be just unreadable. And instead of cleverly adjusting and using what you have you just keep adding on stuff in fear that this one variable that looks like it has no use whatsoever might be crucial for the program after all. And you just don’t know.
Then comes the moment where I want to just delete all the code and start to write it again, knowing that I know more or less exactly what the program is supposed to do (as opposed to the vague description I got when I first started) and, more importantly, I have a pretty good idea about what works and what does not work.
Unfortunately, as I said, that’s out of the question unless I volunteer for spending my evenings and weekends here. Which I won’t. Sorry. It’s a nice idea, though.