Working with the older, scarier parts of our codebase, I sometimes come across comments left by people who are now dead. I always feel a bit sad when I look at code that was written in the 70s or 80s and have to judge it to be bad code, because our ideas about software development have moved on and we now recognize that computed goto statements were a bad idea. It’s worse when the original author is deceased, somehow, because they’re never going to get the chance to put it right or to learn how we do things now.

I worry that my code will outlive me and people will think it’s crap. It *is* crap, of course, or at least I’ve no doubt that it will eventually be judged as such.