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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

The more I program professionally, the less patience I have for clever code in a work setting. I used to love it, but after the nth time it caused me real, physical pain while oncall, I'm no longer a fan.

Clever code doesn't help me in a hundred million++ line repo of code maintained by thousands of people. It is actively detrimental.

Still fun to pick apart for leisure.

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100x this. "Clever" code that takes mere mortals 10x as much time to wrap their heads around than just doing the boring straight-down simple thing are one of the tell-tale signs of smart but inexperienced devs. Hopefully they get the right feedback and use their smartness to write well-structured understandable and maintainable code when they are more senior. Failing that thay tend to grow up into the bitter grumpy dude who just things everybody is stupid.

cleverness is closely related to wit, and brevity is the soul of wit. A sufficient amount of cleverness often allows you to say in a few lines what would otherwise be said in 100s of lines - for example switch statements or numerous ifs going through each possibility with not much difference in how each branching is handled. I find the verbose listing of each possibility gives me physical pain, so I support cleverness in such situations.

Until the spec changes.

The way I get around this is having a dsl no one but me sees that compiles to $lang of choice that everyone does.

Once it produced 20k lines of code in an afternoon. I didn't have to do any work for the next month and still was the top performer by commits.

That definition of "top performer" bears scrutiny. Code is nearly always a liability, not an asset. 20k LoC, generated by a secret tool, sounds more like grounds for firing than promotion.

Or were you making a joke?

Have you worked at big brain dead corp inc?

Yep. But I never used being surrounded by nonsense as an excuse not to try to make things better.

I was getting paid $1,800 per day for three months to do whatever they told me. Does it pay more to do things your way?

If I was motivated by money I’d be on an entirely different career path.

That's nice for you. What would that path be?

Investment quant, usually. If a person wants to truly maximize dollar per hour.

Yes. In more ways than one, too.

This "clever code" is a bit misnomer for this kind of phenomena isn't it? Even overly-complex code is not an accurate term for that because overly-complex code can be caused by an overly-complex valid spec.

"Stupidly out-of-spec code" or "Stupidly prematurely abstracted code" are more fitting to describe those kind of code.

I personally feel uncomfortable calling them clever code because they are not clever at all so that they are causing physical pain.

I'm fortunate to have a complete "creative-control" over a code several times. I frequently tell people to stop writing code that we don't need for the moment. Most of them are anticipation of reuses.

Or to write about.

+1 This is why Haskell & co will never be a mainstream language.

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