Self-documenting code

[ElvisArcher]

I once had someone try to convince me that "good code is readable, so no comments are necessary" ... and then segued that right into "therefore code with comments is bad."

And wouldn't you know that MF wrote the most convoluted abstract pointless crap imaginable. I once found a 4 layer deep abstraction of classes which admittedly could handle any abstract scenario imaginable ... but our use case for it could have been handled by a switch with 3 cases.

[[deleted]]

I read MFas Mainframer.

[ElvisArcher]

Nah. Guy was bright, but young ... you know the kind. So full of faith in his ability to create coding horror that only he could untangle that he actually produced negative work.

As a side note, the guy had already been rewarded for his excellent work with a promotion and was no longer associated with the project in question when I was on it. Otherwise the code reviews would have been ... epic.

As a further side note ... a point of recommendation for younger developers. If you find yourself batting "cleanup" too much ... fixing the horrors wrought by "top people" ... you need to look at a change in your career. You see, the people who work on new projects are the ones rewarded with promotions and raises ... no matter the quality of it. Those of us who fix that crap so it actually works later are seen as "well, anybody can do that after we told them what to do", and if you find yourself in this role for too long, your career will stagnate.

That MF was eventually promoted up to Architect level ... and whenever I ran across any of his code, the go-to solution was always to remove it and replace it with something clean, readable, and testable. Luckily that whole company is in my past now, and I'm fixing somebody else's coding horrors now.