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I think all the time on readability is worthwhile. It sucks to go into an unfamiliar codebase, and that includes your own code you haven’t touched in six months

I think all the time on readability is worthwhile. It sucks to go into an unfamiliar codebase, and that includes your own code you haven’t touched in six months. Making maintenance and usability easy comes first. Once the code is understandable, you can start working on correctness. If you can’t reason about it easily, you can’t get trustworthy correctness. Just like a pyramid implies with readability/understandability at the bottom. That’s different from style nits, and also why automated stylers and linters are so worthwhile, so your tools handle the stuff you don’t want people wasting their time on. Unfortunately, most reviews stop there, but at least it’s the right order in a Maslow-esque pyramid.

hinkley 6y ago
I maintain that part of the disconnect here is that people assume you're looking at the correct piece of code. They defend it being not a big deal that it's arcane because it fits on one page and with a little work you can understand it. But as the code size increases, the likelihood that the bug is in this one function goes down. First I have to scan ten functions and prioritize how likely I think it is that the bug is in #2 versus #7. If every one of them is a precious snowflake, then they all have code smells that I have to investigate. It can take me much longer to find the right one, and by then I've lost the memory slots that contain the reproduction steps and have to dump state again to go pull that back in. "I found what I'm looking for! Now why was I looking for that?"