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Down-vote me if you like, but I'm speaking from a lot of experience, many companies, many projects, many languages, from 'real time / embedded' C w/machine code + custom ASICS, all the way up the stack to the highest level of abstractions + UX.

Clear and boring code written by people who know what they are doing is worth it's weight in gold.

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There's different dimensions of clear and boring, however. I've had to wade through a lot of clear and boring code that was mostly fashionable OO ceremony; the verbosity of it obscured what was going on.

New abstractions need to be introduced sparingly. Building new kinds of abstractions is one of the easiest ways that "cleverness" gets into a codebase, and if the abstractions are don't pay their way, they just obscure. Often they aren't even necessary at all (indirections that only ever point to one thing).

Agreed on the 'ceremony' and 'boilerplate'.

Java - although I love it - tends to be verbose and prone to this kind of stuff.

I think of this case as boring vs tedious. Tedious code should be refactored (if possible) to become boring.

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