In my work history, I've never come across code like this, especially "effortless to follow". All the codebases I've worked with have been head scratch causing balls of mud.
Am I unlucky or is what you are describing the rare exception?
Am I unlucky or is what you are describing the rare exception?
But it requires a team that is committed to aggressively refactoring even the smallest of code smells, usually before even committing it. It also requires a team that is dedicated to its professionalism and not bend into a manager's will of refactoring being a time waste.
But when your team is committed to code quality, holy hell is it satisfying, easy and fast to work with. It really is like night and day. If you have not experienced the difference - I'm sorry to say - then you've just not worked with a high-quality team.
The cleanest codebases are those where the project has a focused goal and is maintained by a few developers with a low churn rate.
https://github.com/bilibili/vlc/blob/master/modules/video_fi...
https://github.com/bilibili/vlc/blob/master/modules/video_fi...
Often they were small dev teams in a small company that have high standards and given the trust & freedom to do things.
I think it boils down to how much the programmer actually cares and is given the necessary time to do a good job.
P.S: Been programming only for 6-7 years so can't say if my experience is any indicator.
100% recommend having your own hobby project so you can reach it.
I would say lofty height only possible in following conditions:
A model of reality / problem domain that the company has created themselves that does not have to integrate with any other company, or have to follow any laws or regulations.
For example let us suppose you create a company for users to send messages to each other using your app. You can totally control everything in your environment - just your app, your definition of users, you definition of messages. But once you need to connect your app to other apps doing similar things but differently than your model you are going to hit edge cases, and if you have to think about making your app work on multiple environments and there are problems as there generally are you will start to be less lofty, and then after you have been going a while you try to enter a market with regulations, or regulation is handed down affecting your app.
Things are getting less lofty quickly at that point.
on edit: grammar