How to restrain one's self from the overwhelming urge to rewrite everything?

Question

Setup

Have you ever had the experience of going into a piece of code to make a seemingly simple change and then realizing that you\'ve just stepped into a wasteland tha

Answer 1

As far as I am concerned, if you have nothing better to do than to rewrite the code then you should make everyone else aware and just do it. Obviously, if it's going to take days to get any sort of result and the changes would mean excessive downtime then it's not a good idea, but eventually that code will become a problem. Make others aware that the code is awful and try to get some sort of movement to rewrite it.

The problem with the above statement is that as a programmer/developer you will ALWAYS have other things to keep yourself busy. Just leave it on the low-priority list of things-to-do, so when you're struggling with some work you can always keep your rhythm going with the rewrite.