What Compsci textbooks don't tell you: Real world code sucks [printer-friendly] • The Register

Don't let your children grow up to be maintenance programmers...

"There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance in most people who’ve moved from the academic study of computer science to a job as a real-world software developer. The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no software out in the wild is, and this is rarely acknowledged.
To be precise: a tremendous amount of source code written for real applications is not merely less perfect than the simple examples seen in school — it’s outright terrible by any number of measures."

What Compsci textbooks don't tell you: Real world code sucks [printer-friendly] • The Register