I even hate that the title got popularized. Code isn’t “clean” or “dirty”. It works or it doesn’t work. That’s the most important aspect. Another very important aspect is that It’s readable or unreadable. Readable code may be very long winded, but I would much rather have that than somebody’s idea of a “clean” concise very abstract piece of logic.

I hate when I get comments on a PR talking about some subjective piece of code suggesting an alternative that they think is “cleaner”. How clean a piece of code is shouldn’t be a part of consideration while reviewing any code. Instead, like I said before, the only thing that really matters is if it works and if it’s readable. I wonder how many junior engineers have been bogged down with pointless PR comments over the years because of this idea that code can somehow be “neat” or “clean”.