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Comment by nameless912 | Hacker News Reader

I think it refers to the Perl-era idea that good code should be somehow "clever" rather than maintainable. It's how bad programmers who spend hours agonizing over how to reduce their line count (presumably to save disk space?) justify their behavior.

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Personally, I think "cowboy coding" is the best derogatory name for this. IMO, what all of these ninjas have in common is that they don't realize that software development is a team exercise. Berkeley did a study on BSD and found that a file was opened 10x more often for reading that writing (i.e. people read code 10 times for every time they make a change). To my mind, "cowboy" conveys the proper amount of ignorance of the other people on your "team."

I totally agree with this sentiment. I think it's pretty well established at this point that in many cases clarity can trump optimization. Even more so when the optimization isn't performance based but rather line count based or "code golf" based. Also, do you happen to have a link to that berkley study? I can't seem to find it with a brief search.

"Cowboy coding" already has a distinct meaning - it refers to writing code as fast as possible without concerns for technical debt.

The archetypal form of cowbody coding is the copy-and-paste: faster than any code reuse technique, but a booby trap for the future.

"Ninja coding", on the other side, refers to coding for cleverness' sake, at the cost of legibility and ease of use. No self-respecting ninja would simply copy-and-paste.

Or, it is how some programmers continue to find motivation and fulfillment in the activity as an intellectual pursuit, yes at the cost of maintainability, but as opposed to being good little corporate drones writing a zillion dull lines of kindergarten-obvious code in Golang and Java that even the lowest decile of programming dunce can understand. Which is what Golang is designed to do. That's what they mean by optimization for large code bases: dumbing down. That's not a criticism by the way because that's optimal for large teams in large companies with large code bases and no room for too much creativity. But programming as art/fun, where appropriate, is also not (yet) completely to be dismissed as stupid, IMO.

For optimal code maintainability, there is a happy compromise between excessively terse and excessively verbose code. There is a lot of code in the wild that's too spread out.

Well sure, but erring on the side of verbosity at least ensures that someone can follow your thinking as long as the code is well structured. I would prefer to read 25 lines of decent Python over 3 lines of regexes in Perl.

Sure, but at least I would prefer 25 lines of decent Python over 125 lines of overly verbose Java. Nothing is black and white, it is easy to make code too verbose and thus very taxing for the reader.

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