Writing about the buildup of technical debt, Ward Cunningham said, “Although immature code may work fine and be completely acceptable to the customer, excess quantities will make a program unmasterable, leading to extreme specialization of programmers and finally an inflexible product.” In this article, I’ll dig into the apparent paradox: how can code work fine and yet be unmasterable? Our code has characteristics of both a machine and pure thought. Technical debt arises when these do not line up. Software developers have a hard time seeing how weird this is because we’re too familiar with our subject. To help us see it from a nonprogrammer perspective, I’m going to try something a bit different in this column. What follows is a fictional conversation between me and a nonprogrammer friend.

中文翻译：

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代码是您的思想伙伴

在谈到技术债务的累积时，沃德·坎宁安 (Ward Cunningham) 说：“虽然不成熟的代码可能运行良好并且客户完全可以接受，但过多的代码会使程序难以掌握，导致程序员极度专业化，最终导致产品不灵活。” 在本文中，我将深入探讨一个明显的悖论：代码如何运行良好却又无法掌握？我们的代码具有机器和纯思想的特征。当这些不对齐时，就会出现技术债务。软件开发人员很难看出这是多么奇怪，因为我们对我们的主题太熟悉了。为了帮助我们从非程序员的角度看待它，我将在本专栏中尝试一些不同的东西。接下来是我和一个非程序员朋友之间的虚构对话。