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That’s the theory. In real life, code is written by teams with different levels of skills over multiple periods of time. Expressiveness is a really hard skill that take years to master and that few people have and that you can only learn by yourself.

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> Expressiveness is a really hard skill that take years to master

It is worse than that. Being good at expressive, self-documenting code correlates with strong communication skills and empathy. So programmers who get good at it tend to increase the risk of managerial borgification.

Do you mean they’re more likely to become managers and thus no longer write great code, or something else?

In general, they tend to get snapped up by other corporate roles, either officially (which at least grants them the pay benefits associated with the role) or unofficially.

I know a lot of great coders who ended up doing anything but code because they were the technical people with communication skills.

I don’t think it’s that hard to learn actually. This works:

1. Before writing a class or a function write comments about what the code will do (unless it’s absolutely trivial)

2. Check if the comments make sense

3. Write the code

That simple practice almost guarantees understandable code.

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