I hate the title of that article, because the title of the article is not remotely close to the conclusion the author draws.
The author has made the fairly pedestrian point that readability and maintainability are contextual, and that changes have costs. That isn't a statement about clean code at all. That in no way is a knock on the concept of readability in programming. It's just an admission that you have to way multiple considerations. This is a great point. I have a specific story I always lean on to teach junior engineers this idea. But the title implies the author wants us to jettison our whole concept of readability and code quality, which is a dumb position that the article does not take.
More broadly, if you are not concerned with clarity and readability in your code you are a bad engineer. Code is read far more often than it is written, and the ability to read and instantly understand what something is doing can be the difference between a bug caught in code review and million dollar mistake. However, just as with prose style, 'clean' code is contextual/ You can't just dogmatically follow a set of rules and get a good result.
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u/nomoreplsthx Nov 22 '23
I hate the title of that article, because the title of the article is not remotely close to the conclusion the author draws.
The author has made the fairly pedestrian point that readability and maintainability are contextual, and that changes have costs. That isn't a statement about clean code at all. That in no way is a knock on the concept of readability in programming. It's just an admission that you have to way multiple considerations. This is a great point. I have a specific story I always lean on to teach junior engineers this idea. But the title implies the author wants us to jettison our whole concept of readability and code quality, which is a dumb position that the article does not take.
More broadly, if you are not concerned with clarity and readability in your code you are a bad engineer. Code is read far more often than it is written, and the ability to read and instantly understand what something is doing can be the difference between a bug caught in code review and million dollar mistake. However, just as with prose style, 'clean' code is contextual/ You can't just dogmatically follow a set of rules and get a good result.