Hacker News Reader

This is so interesting. I have met many people that others considered "geniuses" because they solved hard problems and got things done fast. And then 3 years later, people still complain about having to deal with "[Name of Developer] Code". I guess if you move fast and write code that others can't read, it's easy to get labeled a genius.

View on HN

Yeah, I kind of moved of definition of good code from cool-smart-novel approach to something as simple as possible, that almost anybody can pick up, maintain and improve. This has various aspects - cleanness of the code, comments of algorithms/edge cases, overall structure, modularity etc.

Syntactic sugar can't impress me anymore, unless it comes with significant performance gains or compress the code significantly without sacrificing readability to average Joe coder (this is important part). Actually I prefer 1 page of simple clean code to 1/2-liners that do it all, until they don't. I guess I am getting old.

> And then 3 years later, people still complain about having to deal with "[Name of Developer] Code"

You're saying their code was so good it survived 3 years of real world use and project evolution. That's extremely rare.

Counter intuitive, like the "put the armor where the bullet holes aren't" story about WWII bombers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com