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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

There was that recent post about innovation being a limited resource. Clever is a limited resource. Save your clever for good, insightful architecture, or for when you really need the algorithmic chops. Don't expend it just to impress your coworkers.

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And for the love of god when you do actually need to be clever, document the hell out of why and what the trade offs/benefits were. The first time I had to be clever to get performance I put a nearly half screen comment of why the hell I did it.

Another trick to manage cleverness (or even just messiness) is to hide the code in a well-named function, so readers can understand what it's doing in the context of the rest of the code and only have to delve in when they need to.

Only somewhat jokingly, this is the start of things like doBillCustomer().

"I'm gonna code me a new minivan!" --Wally

My favorite recently is a class named CustomerCommandMapEmbelisherConverter.

It's not a good name. Nor is it concise, informative or anything vaguely useful.

But I get the strong feeling it comes from someone spouting off a line along the lines of "we need to name things for what they do" and then someone else just coming up with that.

In your case I'm going to guess doBillCustomer() is about 2.5k lines long with a copy of its entire logic duplicated and it branches based on annual or monthly billing and subtle bugs have been fixed in one implementation but not the other and now they are diverged such that they are only 93% the same but that means all bets are off. There are 15 levels of nesting and it interacts with at least 5 external systems during all of that.

Am I close?

Move the code that should be clever to a separate function, then add the clever in a single commit.

People tend to tolerate clever code that is out in leaf functions they don’t have to step through, and knowing they could revert the change makes them tolerate the clever longer.

> Clever is a limited resource. Save your clever for good, insightful architecture

I'd sooner say clever is a skill, that gets better with practice. Compare it to solving tricky math problems - the more you solve them, the more clever you 'expend', the better you get.

Some of A, some of B. But there's plenty of ways to expend clever that don't make the code harder to read as well (clever architectures that aren't obvious before you create them but once they are built are still readable). Clever tricks that require being clever to read as well as to write are the dangerous ones.

Clever tricks that require being clever to read as well as to write are the dangerous ones.

There's a level of clever, where things seem complex and abstruse on the surface. There's another level of clever, where things seem clear and simple on the surface, but deep insight went into making things that way. (Then there's a level of faked deep-clever that relies on "automagic," but which isn't as clever as it seemed on the surface and costs a ton of extra debugging time.)

Never meant to imply otherwise :)

Over the years, I have encountered dozens of programmers in their 20's and 30's who seem to prioritize impressing fellow programmers over the clarity of the code base as a whole. In fact, I'd say there's something about programming education which seems to produce these attitudes.

I'd sooner say clever is a skill, that gets better with practice.

Exactly! However, keep in mind the difference between rehearsal and performance, and act according to the cost/benefit. It's very analogous to what stand-up comedians do. They do a form of practice, where they try material out with friends in private. There's another level of practice when they're on the road, but in small, obscure venues. Those are the times when they go "courageous," take risks, and try new things out. It's a different matter entirely, when it's their big HBO special filmed in some huge famous theater. That filmed show is going to be a permanent record which affects their reputation for years after. Think on this, when coworkers check code into production. Code in production might be executed and read years down the road.

Let us say "clever" is problematic when "hard to understand": complex and unintuitive. (The best "clever" is simple and obvious).

The issue is whether it is sufficiently general to become a standard technique.

If so, you're right. Familiarity with it makes you "cleverer", as it becomes intuitive, and less complex (as you push details down into long-term memory).

But, in that case, IMHO, it's even cleverer to "turn over the detail to the machine", i.e. create an abstraction, to hide the detail.

> There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. https://wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

> If so, you're right.

I'm not making any claim regarding the relation between clever and clear/understandable code. Just that writing clever code, however defined, doesn't expend much of a cleverness resource - if anything, it strengthens it.

That is, looking at each piece of clever code in isolation. If the original claim was meant more that a code base has a limit to how many clever tricks it can contain before it becomes unmaintainable, I'd be more inclined to agree.

I see, you're addressing whether cleverness is a limited resource.

Perhaps you're right, that practicing cleverness will make you cleverer.

But it still takes time and effort - perhaps those are the resources that are limited?

Just that writing clever code, however defined, doesn't expend much of a cleverness resource - if anything, it strengthens it.

Walking strengthens the legs and increases endurance. However, no Roman Legionnaire would command his men, as if more marching would only increase capability, and they could therefore march forever and as much as they want. Instead, it's best to reserve the fast marches for when a goal is attainable which gives a tactical or strategic advantage.

There's only 24 hours a day to be clever, and there's only a limited number of hours per day a given person can muster the concentration to be clever.

That is, looking at each piece of clever code in isolation.

Which only applies to an isolated problem, as in a coding interview. In a programming project or a startup, it's more like a military campaign, where there will be many, many interrelated problems over many years.

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