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Hire programmers who can read. Lines like "Don’t use tools that are still too hard to get a grip on" are code for 'your team will get discouraged if they have

Hire programmers who can read. Lines like "Don’t use tools that are still too hard to get a grip on" are code for 'your team will get discouraged if they have to do any homework at all to understand your project'. If that's true, how do you expect them to understand the business requirements? Every large project has embedded tools and legacy tricks so the author is implicitly saying 'don't let projects scale'. Simplicity is hard to achieve, and people who can't understand complex code can't write simple code. If a book hits you on the head and makes a hollow sound, it may not be the fault of the book.

gaastonsr 10y ago
This is my thought. I LIKE to read clever code. Most often than not it teaches me something. Some neat way to do x. It teaches how to write terse code and I'm probably going to learn how to apply that to other areas of my code. I would be worried if my code is being reviewed by somebody who doesn't appreciate clever code. Now, clever is different than complex, or confusing code. Clever code is a neat way to do something. Complex and confusing code can be spotted immediately because it does one or many of the following things: - Functions get too nested - Tries to do too much - Function is too long - Function is not broken into logical parts - Confusing parts don't have their own function - Long conditionals - Non descriptive variable names - Modifies state all over the place And I could go on. Those are the things I would watch out for and that really take a cognitive load on me. Also, clever code is different than tricky code. To try to use a programming language quirk is crazy. You're asking for your code to be hard to read. Using a little known useful feature is good way to extend your team knowledge of a PL.