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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

The fix is to properly document your code. "Clever" code is an anti-pattern, but there's no need to make your code less elegant or less properly engineered than it otherwise could be. Hacked-together, low quality code is even less maintainable than "overly clever" code, so it's worth trying to avoid that.

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Actually - I've found the "elegant properly engineered code" a total NIGHTMARE to deal with. Reflection, endless hierarchies, complexity on complexity.

The PHP script kid basically writes a linear program (tons of duplication) with no crazinesses. Yes, it's "low quality", but if you do a few function out refactorings you've got something very easy to work with.

I just wish there was a standard template - access check, runtime complexity at code comment at top of function (ie, O(1), O(n), O(n^2)) some reasonable comments, error handling, done. Throw in some unit tests if desired.

I full heartely agree. Bonus point for globals you can set checked breakpoints on.

Linear long functions are victims of bullying. Sure, it is a balance act, but I take bad linear code over deeply nested code any day. When trying to figure out how code works I can't keep much depth in my head, unless it is some tree walk on a data tree.

Exactly this.

The person who knows all the "engineering" - you have this giant mutating pile of impossible to fellow (but maybe 5% faster) code.

The person who just codes enterprise style, long but done and easier to follow and edit.

I guess it depends on how you define "enterprise" but I always associated that word with unnecessarily bloated code. Or even worse, trying to reduce the amount of code by pushing more and more to ever more complicated declarative configuration files. That is mostly because when I hear "enterprise" I immediately think Java EE, which to me was the exact polar opposite of easy to edit and follow.

"Reflection, endless hierarchies, complexity on complexity" sounds like the exact opposite of "elegant properly engineered code"

You may not have worked with folks really into "properly engineered code". But it is amazing sometimes to see how they can twist language into pretzels by knowing every trick and pattern out there. And yes, somewhere in OOP land this is all proper engineering and the abstraction on abstraction on library on library is the key.

The worst is when they start talking about future this and that. Trouble!

I think that the parent comment was expressing a disagreement with your definition of "properly engineered code". I agree with them -- simpler code is properly engineered, lots of complex magic is not.

That isn't properly engineered code.

And if you dig into all that code usually the designer didn't understand those tricks and patterns as well as they thought they did and were trying to teach themselves along the way.

You can often throw away 3/4 of the code, throw away 3/4 of the "requirements" which aren't being used and wind up with something that is actually simple and elegant and solves the problem, but doesn't attempt to construct anything as grandiose. Of course YAGNI is a whole lot easier in hindsight when you can really look over the course of years and see that nobody ever needed it so it never should have been built and throw it out.

Such features to throw away /s

(You must not actually remove any of them. Enterprise jokers will want all of it.)

- security (the most forgotten until it bites you)

- GUI flow complexity (client requirement you cannot touch)

- distributed state management with logical consistency guarantees (horizontal scaling)

- ability to quickly adapt for new features

- schema upgrade capability (see above)

- advanced database queries

- event reactivity and/or scheduling (logging, security, notifications)

None of the above is quite actually given to you on a silver platter by any one library really, it a combination thereof, and they're rather hard to grow bottom-up organically.

I've definitely seen my share of impossibly convoluted code written in the name of "best practices" (often done because we need to "future proof" against some imagined future use case), but I've also seen my share of properly engineered code that was elegant, testable, composable and easy to work with (code that "cleaved the problem domain at the joints" if you will).

But what I think the author meant is that the incomprehensible abstraction soup is at least in part a result of the "enterprise development" method. If you are solving a particular problem for a particular application you tend to solve the problem in a straightforward way as possible (if you're any good at least). But if you an "enterprise architect" you are trying to create architectures that both solve no problem in particular and all problems at once. So you tend to get complex abstractions that are both complicated to work with and don't cleanly deal with any particular implementation.

Well of course, that’s why it was put in quotes. The problem is exactly that. Over and over again you’ll come across architectures that are massively over done but claim to be “elegant and properly engineered”.

yeah - the people actually keeping it simple (not designing for 100 future situations that will never actually show up) don't go on and on about elegrant properly engineered code. In general (exceptions exist of course) the entry level person writes much simpler code, focuses more on what needs to happen now.

etc

In my experience it's more likely the entry-level person who will write overly complicated code (or create such systems in general); they haven't yet learned how to identify potential approaches and to choose the most suitable one, and might not appreciate how many of their problems they don't actually need to solve at all.

I think the hidden message in your comment is "duplication over abstraction" - and I agree! Often duplicating things is preferable to complicated abstractions.

I find functions etc fine. But the problem is a lot of code let's you go absolutely crazy with complex design patterns - and folks who like to be "engineers" and "architects" go totally nuts with these. There was a fad I think around OOP (maybe with Java) which then bled into a lot of places. Yes, you can do crazy stuff, generics, meta programming, reflections etc.

But for example, if go just beefed up the standard library (especially around data structures - give us everything - and common functions there) I think they could have pushed a bit longer in terms of holding off on generics.

Sandi Metz has a quote that was something like this "We don't tell me developers about avoiding duplication because it's so important, but because it's the only thing they understand".

Duplication is much better than the wrong abstraction

> The fix is to properly document your code.

I disagree that is the fix. I've seen horrible code that has extremely extensive documentation, and nice code with minimal documentation. I know which I would rather work with.

Documentation has its place, particularly for high level concepts and shared data and interfaces, and tricky, exceptional, or surprising things in the code itself. But it's a poor crutch for bad design or code.

This is 100% correct. There's no amount of writing about code that can make it better. In fact, if you can write well about what the code is doing, you can write the code well. It's a mystery to me that anyone expects people who can't write code that's clear and simple to then be able to write clear and simple prose explaining it. It's actually much easier to write code that only the computer (compiler or runtime) can understand, but it doesn't care if you name things meaningfully or if the structure reflects the problem domain.

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