While we all aim to improve the quality of our code, it’s perhaps best to sometimes take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

“Source Code Is A Liability, Not An Asset”

These words have been said time and again. I first came across it in Kiran Jonnalagadda’s PyCon India talk.

But why? As I understand it, code requires constant maintenance. It needs to be cared for. It constantly needs to be changed. I needs to be deployed, and then those deployments need to be managed. If by a stroke of luck, you find yourself responsible for a codebase that is happily running in production without any intervention from you, once in a while some massive bug like Spectre or Meltdown would be revealed and you’ll have to upgrade/replace your servers.

Why code?

Code is a necessary evil. We require some kind of interface to interact with the machine. Code is currently the only such medium. So while we can’t stay away from code, we should see it for what it is.