Returning to Theory Building (by Peter Naur), and why rewrites are inevitable (developer/maintainer churn = loss of theory), I have a related thought: In the spirit of “a face only a mother could love”, most (if not all) code-bases larger than a page are inherently unlikeable to anyone but the original author, and absent said author, are doomed to be rewritten, either entirely or in part (Ship of Theseus style), or abandoned, as quickly as is possible.