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I think “clever” is more related to unfamiliarity. There is actually a lot of cleverness going on that people just become familiar with. Structured programmin

I think “clever” is more related to unfamiliarity. There is actually a lot of cleverness going on that people just become familiar with. Structured programming is actually very clever if you think about it. Function calls are, when you look at it closely, very clever. It encapsulates how to jump to a function entry point, how to pass on values in registers or in memory, how to adjust stack pointers, and all other sorts of cleverness. For loops are clever with different parts of the statement controlling and executing different parts of the loop. Compare that with BASIC A six year old child can understand: 10 PRINT “Hello” 20 GOTO 10 Going on to object oriented programming, dynamic dispatch and v-tables are clever. What you call and where you go to in your program are determined by the dynamic type of an object. This is very far from the simple BASIC GOTO What difference does looking at it like this make. First we don’t reject automatically reject new concepts just because they aren’t simple. While function calls are complex, they bring many benefits. In addition, this approach emphasizes the role of education to in taking useful concepts and making them familiar to a broader group of people.

P_I_Staker 2y ago
Yes, but people are widely familiar with certain concepts. Hating "clever code" doesn't mean hating any abstraction or good elegant ideas (like function calls). The thing is that this stuff has already been in circulation for so long, and many of the good ideas have been found. If you tried to come up with new solutions for function calls, people would understandably be skeptical.
psychoslave 2y ago
Cleverness is like connecting dots. It might be an instance that reveal a smooth curve that seems so obviously clear afterward but was unfathomed so far. Or it can cast a baffling intricated sequence of discrete points each generated at coordinates using the previous one in a well specified but completely ungrabbable way, the whole drawing a scary screaming face that any sane mind will flea away from.
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
I think there's a difference between "clever" and complex. You can express a complex algorithm or pattern with simple easy to understand code - complexity doesn't have to manifest itself as unreadable or incomprehensible code. To me "clever" code is more about they way you are doing something than the complexity of what you are trying to do. Clever is the opposite of straightforward and easy to comprehend without a detailed explanation. For example you might be "forced" to write clever code as an optimization to calculate something in a non-obvious way, maybe also based on some non-obvious pre-conditions that have been assumed and make this a valid approach. You don't normally want to write "clever" code - you want to write easy to understand straightforward code, and on the occasion when you feel compelled to a clever implementation, for the sake of future you or your teammates, you better precede it with a block comment prefixed with "here be dragons" and a detailed explanation of what it is doing and why it is doing it in this non-obvious way.
- dotnet00 2y ago
  I also prefer this perspective. I had an epiphany about this sort of code when I was trying to describe what my code did for a research paper, and in trying to express why I was proud of it, I called it complex, only for my research advisor to point out that complexity was not the point of the work, so calling it complex did not convey what about it made the research interesting. Although it wasn't his intention, it changed my perspective on the "clever" tricks I liked using, since it made me realize that being clever was not the kind of complexity that mattered. So, nowadays I try to write simple, easy to understand code, leaving the cleverness and complexity to the way the problem is tackled.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
    Just to codify this with some examples: Here’s some recent examples of what I consider “clever” that I’ve had to work with from previous people and that I’ve written myself: Someone who loved Lisp wrote a bunch of the unit test suites where I work using Python in a very clever metaprogramming way. They would dynamically generate and attach functions to a test object for testing REST requests. This is both 1. Difficult to read and understand 2. Much more difficult to test the behavior of All to save probably maybe 100 lines of code. This is an example where I feel like code is too clever for its own good without having a good reason to be like that. It also flies in the face of what you would conventionally expect when it comes to Python unit test suites. One example where sometimes it’s necessary to be clever: I did a db migration in about 100 lines of Python/SQL that worked fine at small scale using Alembic/Python/SQL and was a straightforward update with CTE. When tested on large production grade dataset however it completely fell apart. Some clever hacks with batching and temp table later and I have something runnable, but now it’s all in sql and while well commented is much harder to grok what’s going on at first glance.
ekzy 2y ago
Yes. A relevant quote from Alan Kay in his talk “the power of simplicity”: > one of the things that's worked the best the last three, or four hundred years, is you get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of. its when you go for a simple building block that anybody understand through common sense, that is when you start screwing yourself right and left, because it just might not be able to ramify through the degrees of freedom and scaling you have to go through, and it's this inability to fix the building blocks that is one of the largest problems that computing has today in large organizations. people just won't do it https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs
mianos 2y ago
It's not this and there is a test: Judging something assumes at least a minimal level of expertise in both the domain and language. I don't know Ruby, a lot looks obtuse, that's not a sign of clever code. If I see examples like the article in languages I know, it's 'clever code'.
- MrJohz 2y ago
  But even then, there's degrees of knowledge and familiarity within that. For example, in Python, is using the `else` block of a for-loop clever? It's a part of the language that I'm familiar with - in principle it's just domain knowledge. But I've worked with plenty of Python devs who've never seen or used that construct before. For them, it's often black magic, and a classic example of "clever" code. The point is that everyone judges cleverness based on what they know and are familiar with. If I need to think too hard to understand it, then it's clever code. But everyone has different levels of familiarity and experience, which means that cleverness is always an individual metric.
  - MattPalmer1086 2y ago
    Yep. A long time ago I remember using C# delegates to pass methods into a standard error handling wrapper. It's part of the language, but this was before functional programming was part of most OO Devs toolkit. Everyone was completely confused by it.

P_I_Staker 2y ago

Yes, but people are widely familiar with certain concepts. Hating "clever code" doesn't mean hating any abstraction or good elegant ideas (like function calls). The thing is that this stuff has already been in circulation for so long, and many of the good ideas have been found. If you tried to come up with new solutions for function calls, people would understandably be skeptical.

psychoslave 2y ago

Cleverness is like connecting dots. It might be an instance that reveal a smooth curve that seems so obviously clear afterward but was unfathomed so far. Or it can cast a baffling intricated sequence of discrete points each generated at coordinates using the previous one in a well specified but completely ungrabbable way, the whole drawing a scary screaming face that any sane mind will flea away from.

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago

I think there's a difference between "clever" and complex. You can express a complex algorithm or pattern with simple easy to understand code - complexity doesn't have to manifest itself as unreadable or incomprehensible code. To me "clever" code is more about they way you are doing something than the complexity of what you are trying to do. Clever is the opposite of straightforward and easy to comprehend without a detailed explanation. For example you might be "forced" to write clever code as an optimization to calculate something in a non-obvious way, maybe also based on some non-obvious pre-conditions that have been assumed and make this a valid approach. You don't normally want to write "clever" code - you want to write easy to understand straightforward code, and on the occasion when you feel compelled to a clever implementation, for the sake of future you or your teammates, you better precede it with a block comment prefixed with "here be dragons" and a detailed explanation of what it is doing and why it is doing it in this non-obvious way.

dotnet00 2y ago
I also prefer this perspective. I had an epiphany about this sort of code when I was trying to describe what my code did for a research paper, and in trying to express why I was proud of it, I called it complex, only for my research advisor to point out that complexity was not the point of the work, so calling it complex did not convey what about it made the research interesting. Although it wasn't his intention, it changed my perspective on the "clever" tricks I liked using, since it made me realize that being clever was not the kind of complexity that mattered. So, nowadays I try to write simple, easy to understand code, leaving the cleverness and complexity to the way the problem is tackled.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
  Just to codify this with some examples: Here’s some recent examples of what I consider “clever” that I’ve had to work with from previous people and that I’ve written myself: Someone who loved Lisp wrote a bunch of the unit test suites where I work using Python in a very clever metaprogramming way. They would dynamically generate and attach functions to a test object for testing REST requests. This is both 1. Difficult to read and understand 2. Much more difficult to test the behavior of All to save probably maybe 100 lines of code. This is an example where I feel like code is too clever for its own good without having a good reason to be like that. It also flies in the face of what you would conventionally expect when it comes to Python unit test suites. One example where sometimes it’s necessary to be clever: I did a db migration in about 100 lines of Python/SQL that worked fine at small scale using Alembic/Python/SQL and was a straightforward update with CTE. When tested on large production grade dataset however it completely fell apart. Some clever hacks with batching and temp table later and I have something runnable, but now it’s all in sql and while well commented is much harder to grok what’s going on at first glance.

ekzy 2y ago

Yes. A relevant quote from Alan Kay in his talk “the power of simplicity”: > one of the things that's worked the best the last three, or four hundred years, is you get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of. its when you go for a simple building block that anybody understand through common sense, that is when you start screwing yourself right and left, because it just might not be able to ramify through the degrees of freedom and scaling you have to go through, and it's this inability to fix the building blocks that is one of the largest problems that computing has today in large organizations. people just won't do it https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs

mianos 2y ago

It's not this and there is a test: Judging something assumes at least a minimal level of expertise in both the domain and language. I don't know Ruby, a lot looks obtuse, that's not a sign of clever code. If I see examples like the article in languages I know, it's 'clever code'.

MrJohz 2y ago
But even then, there's degrees of knowledge and familiarity within that. For example, in Python, is using the `else` block of a for-loop clever? It's a part of the language that I'm familiar with - in principle it's just domain knowledge. But I've worked with plenty of Python devs who've never seen or used that construct before. For them, it's often black magic, and a classic example of "clever" code. The point is that everyone judges cleverness based on what they know and are familiar with. If I need to think too hard to understand it, then it's clever code. But everyone has different levels of familiarity and experience, which means that cleverness is always an individual metric.
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago
  Yep. A long time ago I remember using C# delegates to pass methods into a standard error handling wrapper. It's part of the language, but this was before functional programming was part of most OO Devs toolkit. Everyone was completely confused by it.