[PRL] Code's Worst Enemy

[William D Clinger]

Riccardo wrote:
> But the message I got was that any project that starts
> small and grows over the course of ten years to hundreds
> of thousand lines of code will almost inevitably be a
> mess, irrespectively of the language....You have to
> design for such sizes, and factoring out in libraries
> and separate modules is key.

Bingo.

> Heck, SML/NJ was such a project, and its code was a mess
> when I came to it.

Other examples:  PLT Scheme.  Larceny.

Both of those systems are cleaner than many, but there's
plenty of mess in both.  Fixing the mess is Sisyphean.

Will