

Going Dark (a response to Jeff Atwood) - mtts
http://tech.rommelhok.com/2008/06/15/going-dark/

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sofal
I'm always skeptical when people equate elegant or clever algorithms with
convoluted, unmaintainable trash. One reason is that the terms "elegant" and
"clever" are so ambiguous and are frequently defined as "code that I cannot
understand" by people that can't tell a closure from a case statement.
Cleverness doesn't imply unnecessary obfuscation and complexity. In my own
experience I'm constantly exposed to code that is completely lacking in
cleverness, which makes it unnecessarily bloated, complex, unorganized, and
redundant. Much of it can be deleted and rewritten with just a few lines of a
little bit more "cleverly" crafted code, making it much easier on the mind and
eyes. If it requires some developers to learn what "pattern matching" means,
then this is a good thing.

It's just that I haven't had any experiences where some developer pulled out
an obfuscated hack that he/she was proud of, calling it "clever", and having
it cause maintenance problems. All of the maintenance problems I've come
across have been from code that was decidedly not clever or elegant and not
something I could imagine anyone being particularly proud of. Has anyone else
run into this "cleverness" problem that I hear so much about yet never
experienced? I read a lot of the “your hack may be clever but it doesn't make
us money” fist-shaking from developer blogs. Maybe I just hang around the
wrong developers. I do work for BigCo (only a month and a half left!), and so
this is certainly a possibility. The words "enjoy" and "coding" are never used
in the same sentence here.

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jgamman
hardly a response - more like a 'yeah, i agree'. i downvoted in my mind...

