Kent Beck on code maintainabilty

I don’t often have entries that are just quotes, but I liked this from Kent Beck on the importance of code maintainability:

Your organization is going to spend a lot more on somebody – you or somebody else – reading what you’re writing right now than they are ever going to spend on you writing it.

You’re going to read that code yourself 10 to 100 times for every time you write it, so it’s worth taking the trouble to make it readable. You’re going to modify it five times after you write it the first time, so it makes sense to make it easy to change.