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Comment by math-dev | Hacker News Reader

My suggestion is to find some programmers in your selected language who you look up to and learn from them how best to write code in that language

I may be generalising but I find older (40+) programmers more likely to write good code - they have all the war zone experience and battle scars

For example, in Common Lisp I am a big fan of

https://github.com/informatimago

and also Allegro Common Lisp’s open source code

I must admit, the _art_ of writing readable code really appeals to me and is one of my finest joys in programming

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> I may be generalising but I find older (40+) programmers more likely to write good code

I think it's also because they don't deal with complexity as well as younger programmers so they strive for simplicity (which is good).

> I must admit, the _art_ of writing readable code really appeals to me and is one of my finest joys in programming

Totally agree. Unfortunately, this isn't rewarded as much in a professional settings were you're expected to write features. Refactoring is much less visible, unless you're refactoring a piece of code which everyone was struggling with.

>I think it's also because they don't deal with complexity as well as younger programmers so they strive for simplicity (which is good).

Yeah, I'm going to have to ask for details here. When I was a youngster, it was the older folks who were my guides through the forests of complexity, especially when it came to interconnections between things, unintended side effects, and far-ranging consequences of design choices. When I got to that ripe old state of being 40+, that was my role as well.

Do you mean that in the sense that they have the experience, that unnecessary complexity will later bite you?

> I must admit, the _art_ of writing readable code really appeals to me and is one of my finest joys in programming

One of the best compliments I've ever received was when a team member told me I created the most beautiful looking code she's ever seen. This was from both a pleasing to the eye and ability to grok perspective. The latter was mostly due to naming things in ways that made their purpose obvious and avoiding the temptation to do as much work in a single line of code as possible.

>I may be generalising but I find older (40+) programmers more likely to write good code

[...]

>For example, in Common Lisp

Technology choice can correlate with age. In Lisp's case I would expect that it's long past "cool", i.e. that it's attracting fewer people than it used to, and so I would expect it to skew older.

Just like perl and tcl and awk.

Also you would have to take survivor bias into account - if you only see good lisp projects, maybe that's because the bad lisp projects died out? Maybe the bad old lisp programmers left?

There is a lot of bad lisp code out there, especially these days (most open source projects in CL are more about look how smart I am but by themselves are mostly terrible code).

But I agree with your first point, the _older_ lisp programmers may very well be the ones that kept at it and honed their skills while the poorer programmers jumped ship before then

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