Ugly code may be very valuable, depending on why it’s ugly. I’m not saying that it’s good for code to be ugly, but that code that is already ugly may be valuable.
Some of the ugliest code was started by someone who knew the problem domain well but did not know how to write maintainable code. It may implicitly contain information that is not explicitly codified anywhere else. It may contain information the original programmer isn’t even consciously aware of. It’s often easier to clean up the code than to surface the information it contains using any other source.
Another way code gets ugly is undisciplined modification by multiple programmers over a long period of time. In that case the code has proved to be useful. It’s the opposite of Field of Dreams code that you hope will be used if you build it.
Working effectively with legacy code is hard. It may be easier, and certainly more pleasant, to start from scratch. Even so, there may be more to learn from the old code than is immediately obvious.
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This post was motivated by looking to extend some code I use in my business. It wouldn’t win a beauty pageant, but it’s very useful.
Writing this post reminded me of a post Productive Productivity that I wrote a while back. From that post:
The scripts that have been most useful are of zero interest to anyone else because they are very specific to my work. I imagine that’s true of most scripts ever written.