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Comment by msravi | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. It's true that simpler code is more maintainable and all that. But what happens to the fun and joy of coding? You remove the fun part, and you're left with dry processes and mind-numbing toil that suck the joy out of a passionate endeavor. I get it that many see programming as a means to an end, and that's totally fine, but why take away from those that derive an intellectual high from it?

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I leave the fun to my side projects. There I write overly clever code and play with the language.

Some of these ideas end up in production if I can find a way to make them less clever-looking and more approachable.

When I was younger I wrote fun code in production. Then I had to extend it or debug it some years later and struggled to figure out what was going on. Invariably ended up rewriting it to plain code, often many lines more but with clear intent and little ambiguity.

Because I don't want to debug your clever code when we have an outage and you're on vacation

Fortunately my code is perfect so it never needs debugging.

The fun, intellectually stimulating part definitely takes a back seat in priority over keeping the lights on for customers/colleagues most of the time, except in personal/weekend projects.

You can be fun and clever on your own time. When you're doing code in a team, prefer readability over clever terseness and premature optimisation.

Doubly so if (when) you're not the one who has to come look at the code in 5 years and spend days deciphering the clever bits.

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