I’ve been reading Debugging .Net 2.0 Applications by John Robbins and just came across this great quote which is attributed to François Poulin:
Code as if whoever maintains your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
There is a common thread to things that people have been saying in the Test Driven community: the tests are the comments, or test are as good as comments. I don’t think that is entirely true, but that is besides the point.
Why do you comment, why do you write unit tests? Because you are worried about the livelihood of the next person to work on your code. I consider it developer arrogance to assume your code will be maintained by you, or that your code wont need to be changed after you are done.
Code is never finished, and code is never perfect. But, if you code works well enough, and the project has some importance, someone is going to need to support your code. Possibly even make a modification to keep it working do to a changed infrastructure.
If you don’t, watch out, I’ll be lurking in a dark hallway with a super-soaker with your name on it. If your lucky, it will only have water in it.
I needed that laugh. I had read that a while ago, but that quote was priceless.