>The code of a working product records the decisions, the designs, solved problems and solved mistakes during the development.
Our experiences apparently differ. I've worked on dozens of large scale systems and due to the lack of up to date documentation and comments in the code the developers have had to re-engineer most of those details in order to make even minor changes as the requirements evolve over the years. The code might work, but the knowledge of how and why is generally lost to entropy.
Yes sure, the code might be unreadable but it’s the working copy that any changes based on and run against. Throwing it away and recreating the changes in vacuum would be very difficult.
Our experiences apparently differ. I've worked on dozens of large scale systems and due to the lack of up to date documentation and comments in the code the developers have had to re-engineer most of those details in order to make even minor changes as the requirements evolve over the years. The code might work, but the knowledge of how and why is generally lost to entropy.