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"Great code is simple and clear in a human sense, not just minimal in a conceptual or computational sense." Old time programmers can't get past the low resourc

"Great code is simple and clear in a human sense, not just minimal in a conceptual or computational sense." Old time programmers can't get past the low resources of old systems so they continue to prefer clever and tight code over simple and clear code. Last I was in school many of my teachers preferred clever code so that's the coding style we strived to copy. I suspect that's still the gold standard. But I agree, simple and clear in a human sense, is much better. Specially in a team environment where we need to read other's code. Having to explain your code is just wasted effort and time.

wanderingstan 4y ago
As an old time programmer myself, I anecdotally notice that junior developers seem more prone to use dense/clever code, while more experienced devs prefer clear and easy to maintain code.
- waste_monk 4y ago
  They're probably being taught by academics who were adapted to the old school low-resource style of programming, and have been out of industry long enough that they never adapted to modern best practice. And assignments tend to praise cleverness over readability and long-term maintainability, because who cares if it's read-only code when your assignment only spans a few weeks and then never matters again - you just need to impress the professor (or TA who does the actual grading) and move on. The university system does sometimes result in students having strange ideas that are a bit divorced from industry best practices (and in some cases reality), due to the attitudes of their teachers rubbing off on them. I had one professor who continually insisted we were on the verge of a major resurgence of semantic web technologies and strict XHTML, and a friend who took a dev tools course (mostly focusing on git, makefiles, etc.) and was told tools like Maven would never take off and you're better off managing dependencies by hand (this was around ~2017). I don't want to be harsh on academics / the tertiary education system in general, but I think it's kind of an unavoidable consequence. Maybe "boot camp" students fare better?

wanderingstan 4y ago

As an old time programmer myself, I anecdotally notice that junior developers seem more prone to use dense/clever code, while more experienced devs prefer clear and easy to maintain code.

waste_monk 4y ago
They're probably being taught by academics who were adapted to the old school low-resource style of programming, and have been out of industry long enough that they never adapted to modern best practice. And assignments tend to praise cleverness over readability and long-term maintainability, because who cares if it's read-only code when your assignment only spans a few weeks and then never matters again - you just need to impress the professor (or TA who does the actual grading) and move on. The university system does sometimes result in students having strange ideas that are a bit divorced from industry best practices (and in some cases reality), due to the attitudes of their teachers rubbing off on them. I had one professor who continually insisted we were on the verge of a major resurgence of semantic web technologies and strict XHTML, and a friend who took a dev tools course (mostly focusing on git, makefiles, etc.) and was told tools like Maven would never take off and you're better off managing dependencies by hand (this was around ~2017). I don't want to be harsh on academics / the tertiary education system in general, but I think it's kind of an unavoidable consequence. Maybe "boot camp" students fare better?