I don’t have a problem with this term, but English is not my first language. Anyway, quoting Wikipedia on the origins of it:
The term was popularised by Kent Beck on WardsWiki in the late 1990s. Usage of the term increased after it was featured in the 1999 book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler.
Exactly that Roger!
The term code (bad) smells were coined and popularized by Fowler and Beck in 1999 in their well-known book on Refactoring. In addition to coining the terms in this book, they also cataloged 22 traditional code smells. Some of them are part of our survey, as they are also discussed in the context of Elixir. There are other synonyms in the literature to refer to these sub-optimal code structures, such as anti-patterns, code anomalies, and bad practices.
I know some people think the terms code (bad) smells are pejorative. There was a recent discussion on Hacker News about our work and I saw some people complaining about this term as well. We chose to use the term code smells because it is by far the most used term in the literature to describe these sub-optimal structures. This is even a very researched topic in software engineering.
The term also quite well relates to the problem it is describing about “crude or poor code”. It is designed to illicit that reaction by its connotations.
Hello guys!
I would like to thank the great number of Elixir developers who have already participated in our survey. We will collect responses until October 5th at 12:00 PM (UTC-3) for those who have not yet participated and are interested. Enjoy this opportunity! 