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Coding Horrors: The Tales of codebase complexity

• syndicatedjelly 3y ago
  > That was an important lesson. Dumb, readable code is infinitely better than clever. Ok I completely disagree with the first point. The author describes translating XML files using an unusual (at the time) method which most of his colleagues couldn't understand. He was ahead of the curve, yet his colleagues were not smart enough to keep up. This is where good documentation is important. He should be helping his colleagues understand what it is that he did and why it's so useful. Give a few presentations, help them see the way. Instead, the lesson that he's taken away is that we should all reduce ourselves to the lowest common denominator of our current and future colleagues, because it's better for everyone to be able to do things incorrectly than it is for one person to lead the way. > I think about this pretty much every time I install a new npm module or otherwise import someone else’s code… what otherwise sensible thing is it doing that might ruin my day? This is an enormous, important part of every programmer's job. Neglecting to dig into the details of every single submodule you use is like a mechanical engineer failing to understand the type of fastener used to secure two elements, or an electrical engineer that ignores the details of an IC chip. An engineer should never treat a subcomponent assembly like a black box.