Brian Mastenbrook: Can someone else work on your code?

Stefan Scholl asks whether you can get someone else to work on your Common Lisp program. I think that if you ask most people whether someone else could maintain their code, they would answer no, regardless of the language. It's not because they are so proud of their own abilities that they doubt anybody else's ability to maintain their work. Rather many programmers I've talked to think their code is so bad that nobody else can understand it.

I work with a large Common Lisp codebase at work, and I'm often surprised at how easy it is to maintain and make changes to even the "bad" parts of the code. I think this is a combination of having good tools and having test cases for the code. Regression testing makes it easier to understand what impact a change has on multiple test cases. The ability to run just one of those test cases, break inside the function you're interested in, and then inspect the local variables helps an awful lot too.

I think this also prevents a lot of people from asking for help with their codebase by opening it up. They feel the code is not ready for public distribution because it's not good enough. No code is, once it's subjected to real users and their requirements. The adaptability of the codebase is what matters.