Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlexCoventry | Hacker News Reader

> Something bizarre I have noticed though in junior-almost-senior engineers is that they pride themselves in obfuscating and writing "highly complex" logic

I think it happens because most measures of code quality are quite fuzzy, but brevity (which is valuable, other things being equal) is relatively objective. "Have I made the code shorter?" is a much easier question to answer than "Have I made the code easier to understand, modify and maintain?"

View on HN

> "Have I made the code shorter?" is a much easier question to answer than "Have I made the code easier to understand, modify and maintain?"

This is something that comes with experience though, and I think a lot of people don't truly grok this until they are trying to maintain their own terse/clever code written months/years earlier. Nothing is quite as humbling as doing `git blame` on some crappy code only to see your own name there.

Yeah, it's certainly a phase I went through.

I think another place people can end up here is if they don't know what the compiler is doing under the hood, it's easy to assume the shortest code will perform the fastest or something like that. "Presumably this cool trick avoids these extra steps" type of things.

Before I had written much assembly, I used to think ifs to avoid assignments was smart. Turns out avoiding branching is better for both testability and performance.

A similar thing I've noticed a trend of recently in frontend react codebases is overuse of memoization. It seems as though people don't realize how it works and that it is often _less_ performant than just doing some low cost computation on each render (like a comparison or basic math).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com