Software development words of wisdom

Forgive the blog spam, but I read something from joelonsoftware.com that really resonated with me.

There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it.

Another interesting idea I’ve read about today was the idea of code debt.