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Comment by makmanalp | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to "study" clean code. You just have to overcome the tendency to write code in an overly smartypants way. Coincidentally, in my experience, there seems to be a correlation between people who love to study algorithms and people who love doing this. :)

I can reduce that 20 line function into one line of maps / filters / reduces too, but I know I shouldn't if it's going to take 20 minutes for someone else (or me 6 months later) to get through it.

Basically, don't aim to reduce Kolmogorov complexity, aim to increase readability. These two aren't completely mutually exclusive anyway.

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> You don't have to "study" clean code. You just have to overcome the tendency to write code in an overly smartypants way.

This is a great point. As an industry, we seem to be impressed by complex solutions (even if the complexity is unnecessary and the code unmaintainable). Writing clean, obvious code is often met with a "Duh, I see why it was written that way", but without understanding that it took a long time to get the complex solution down to that point.

I agree with the sentiment of your comment, and especially like your last two sentences. Maybe I'm just expanding on your last sentence.

I have to object to "20 line function into one line of maps / filters / reduces". I don't know what the 20-line function looks like, but I find use of classic higher order functions instead of loops makes code drastically quicker to read accurately.

As with human language, a larger vocabulary can be used in an "overly smartypants" way, but it can also be used to more quickly and robustly convey information between people (or to your future self).

Clean code is more than just not writing obtuse code. There is a lot of literature on the subject spanning advice about patterns and principles to cookbook recipes for problems and so forth. The challenging part with clean code is that most of it is fairly subjective. More of an art than a science. We know clean code when we see it, but we cannot always reproduce it ourselves.

If you haven't read the literature and do not practice with the different techniques, you are probably not writing clean code.

> in my experience, there seems to be a correlation between people who love to study algorithms and people who love doing this.

Very well put.

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