What do we write ? Complex or bad code?

In my professional life, I have written some code. At times, I took pride in phrases like complex requirement, complex solution and complex code. There were two fallouts:

a.      A sense of accomplishment that I am doing something worthwhile prevailed. If you do not want me to sugar coat this, the right word to describe the previous italic word in current generation parlance is – cool.  

b.      It stayed. It stayed because it was more unmanageable than useful.

In short, it helped no one.  On the other hand, code needed help.

Did not bother me earlier – it is slowly registering now. Those terms are wrong. I would prefer to translate them as ununderstood requirement, ambiguous solution and bad code respectively.

The real-life business requirements in summary, are simple. Good programming fraternity (Technical and non-technical folks) make sure that they do not translate into a not-so-simple program requirements.  They also make sure that code grows where required and genesis of new code where applicable, occur. In other words, they make it simpler.

A complex code, as in what it is referred to in the first paragraph – is essentially an in-house invention of code quality degradation.  Either in the name of fastest-to-market, or in the name of upgrade, or in the name of feature enhancement – code is either appended or inserted – makes it harder. Harder to read, harder to own, harder to debug, harder to enhance, harder to scale.

Irony- simple things are the hardest to get used to.