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Comment by geocar | Hacker News Reader

No.

Rule one is making code that works correctly and quickly, in a short about of time. This is 100% of the job.

If you think that "maintainability" and "readability" and "popular" libraries, and "code reuse" and "good variable names" and code that "smells good" to you, help someone do that, then great: That's an argument we can have just by pointing to anyone who gets rule one without those things.

However.

There's another kind of person - and there's a lot of them - who thinks those things are important by themselves, and that putting those things ahead of what I think are rule one is ever acceptable.

The number of times I've heard some "experienced" programmer say with all earnestness that we should ask for another 1/4 million dollars of tin so that he can use his "clean" (but slow) algorithm makes me wary of anyone who uses those words you just used in seriousness.

That's the person the parent comment is mocking.

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> There's another kind of person - and there's a lot of them - who thinks those things are important by themselves, and that putting those things ahead of what I think are rule one is ever acceptable.

I think you totally understood my humor. Thanks!

I saw a good blog in 2011 about how it is a waste of time to overbuild things since mostly you are only ever going to use that code for the specific purpose you are writing it, and you'll likely never need to generalize and you'll probably chuck it out anyway and start from scratch.

Obviously there are a bunch of caveats to that and it's not always true that's the case but I think it's a very useful counterpoint to the profession's current best-practice obsession. If you keep it in mind, alongside all the best practices, and you make a choice about approach in any given situation based on appropriateness, rather than just robotically applying best practices or giving into that common Engineer's temptation to overbuild, this counterpoint can help you build quickly just what's needed, which is effective, exactly like you said.

No problem. And I agree almost completely:

I don't think those caveats are obvious to a junior (or otherwise inexperienced) developer. Maybe some of them are obvious, but I don't think anyone runs into these enough daily that programming by dogma actually helps.

And yet I do see value if there are rules! Why should we think about having "good variable names" or not if most of the time "good variable names" don't cause much harm, and most of the time not having them does?

It's just that I don't think this is a real problem; I don't believe anyone actually makes that choice.

I think if something doesn't have "good variable names" (as an example), then it's possible someone was programming who couldn't think of good ones (to which the rule wouldn't help anyway), and it's possible that these are good variable names, and that it's our opinion that is wrong (perhaps because we don't yet understand what we're looking at). NB) I'm not saying both are equally likely.

To put it another way, how can one recommend programming by brute force, "as long as you've got "readability" and "popular" libraries, and "code reuse" and "good variable names" and so on... What can we possibly add to that list that will be even a good substitute for a few decades of experience successfully delivering software?

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