I think we should stop stretching the word "clean" to encompass everything we approve and disapprove of in code. Your discussion of the underlying issues is per

I think we should stop stretching the word "clean" to encompass everything we approve and disapprove of in code. Your discussion of the underlying issues is perfect - the author's coding dilemma is a classic tradeoff between the complexity of repetition versus the complexity of abstraction. "Clean", if it means anything at all, is not the dimension on which these options differ. I elaborated on this in a separate comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38568178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38568178