http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=389772


in reply to Ninja style coding... is it bad?

First, I see a problem with the idea of code "ownership".
If you are in an environment where you are coding for a production environment, no-one truly "owns" the code. Especially once it has been released into production. I can understand some level of code "ownership" before release, ie: the programmer checks out something in order to work on it. I would be very disdainful of anyone going in and changing code I was currently working on. But once checked in, it becomes fair game again.

My point is that having worked on maintaining other people's code for a significant part of my career, hiding changes is a big no-no to me.
Part of every change to a piece of code, for me, is adding a note at the top of the file that I have editied this code, what I did, and on what date. Also, I include a comment at the point where I made the change, with my initials and the date again. I feel that the loss of flow in reading the code is more than made up for by the time saved looking for that last change that needs to be backed out or tweaked because of changing requirements or expectations or bugs.