Contextualizebeta

code smell

noun

Etymology

Analogous to a bad smell indicating e.g. rotten food. Apparently coined by American software engineer Kent Beck, in the late 1990s. Popularized via the book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, co-authored by Beck.

Definitions

  1. Anything in a program's source code that suggests the presence of a design problem.

    • A well-known code smell is as follows: a function should do one thing.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for code smell. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA