It doesn’t take as much cleverness simply to write code that no one understands and then to bluster a lot about it. It takes a lot of cleverness to write code that both contains complex, unique approaches and that your colleagues can understand. I’d argue that his difficult but ‘brilliant’ former colleague wasn’t actually particularly brilliant. Galute” up to this point, and I would probably even take a stronger position. Management learned its lesson from this, and realized that it’s better to have boring code that the group understands, rather than ingenious code that only one person understands.
Nobody really understands what he did, which means that we either need to maintain code that we don’t get or else that we need to rewrite it. This brilliant coder was also something of a bully, intimidating and chasing off anyone who dared question his special, unique approach.īut then he left, and we’re kind of screwed. He wrote crazy complex code and acquitted himself well in justifying it, so we assumed it was necessary.
I worked with a guy that was (or seemed) really smart. He makes a point that I really like in the first part of the post, and then, unfortunately, in my estimation, follows it up with something of a non sequitur in the form of examples of what he considers to be “maintainable.” Here’s my quick summary of his post, if you don’t want to read it in its entirety. The overlap here is an interesting one, to be sure - this supposedly ‘brilliant’ code would seem to offer a specific kind aesthetic appeal in the same vein as solving a math problem in an unprecedented, but needlessly complex way.Īs for what I think of the post itself, I’m skeptical as to the existence of this ‘brilliant’ code, and I suspect the author is a bit too. In the medium piece, the author, “Mr Galute,” draws a distinction between “brilliant code” and “maintainable code.” Brilliant code, more or less, is the sort of code that requires a unique mind to dream up and a unique mind to understand, while maintainable code is the sort that any pro developer can maintain. In my post, the one to which the reader refers, I talk about the (small) intersection aesthetic appeal and software writing. It would probably help to read both pieces for background, but in case you don’t have the time, I’ll summarize the train of thought here. I found this article and thought there was some interesting overlap with your ' Is Programming Art' article.
In it, the other talks about what he calls “maintainable code,” but what I actually think of as “common code.” Before I get started talking about these terms and the difference, however, consider the actual reader question. Today, I’m going to answer a reader question that asks for my opinion on a blog post from medium.
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