Chapter 10. Increasing Maintainability (Prophylaxis)

Tara King, on seeing Steed playing with a toy airplane: “Aren’t you a little old for that sort of thing?” Steed: “It’s a present for my nephew’s tenth birthday.” Tara: “When’s that?” Steed: “Three years ago. The instructions are very hard to follow.”

— Patrick Macnee and Linda Thorson in The Avengers

Image

Having taken charge of a program and made it your own, the last thing you want is for it to turn into the same kind of albatross that you got saddled with in the first place. So it falls to you to make it as maintainable as you can.

10.1. Making It Robust

The more robust a program is, the less ...

Get Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.