SMRTR ProgrammingJan 19, 2026John D. Cook

Two cheers for ugly code

SMRTR summary

Ugly code often contains valuable domain knowledge that isn't documented elsewhere, especially when written by experts who understood the problem but lacked clean coding skills. Code that becomes messy through years of modifications proves its usefulness, making it worth preserving and refactoring rather than rewriting from scratch.

SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to John D. Cook.

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