Why Clean Code?

Does looks matter?

Yes certainly it matters

but but we are talking about code here

Yes it still matters

Why?

I know of one company that, wrote a killer business solution. It was very popular, and lots of organisations bought and used it. But then the release cycles began to stretch. Bugs were not repaired from one release to the next. Load times grew and crashes increased. I remember the day we left the product down in frustration and never used it again. The company went out of business a short time after that.

A year or two later I met one of the early employees of that company and asked him what had happened. The answer confirmed my fears. They had rushed the product to market and had made a huge mess in the code. As they added more and more features, the code got worse and worse until they simply could not manage it any longer. It was the bad code that brought the company down.

Yes good code can turn the life span of software, they can be afford to enhancements, changes and anybody could work on them(mostly because it is very less likely the original witters of the legacy code to still maintain the system)