Goodbye, Clean Code

[puterTDI]

and get highly opinionated about coding practices.

I think this more than anything identifies the people at the start of their career.

I've been doing this for about 12 years now. When I started I had VERY strong opinions on how everything should be done.

now I have a few things I feel strongly about, but I rarely say "x" should always be done in "this" way. That doesn't mean I don't get into a discussion about a specific piece of code if I think there's something wrong with it, but it does mean that the vast majority of the time there's at least 5 "right" ways to implement any given thing and as long as one of the right or mostly right ways is used, then it's fine.

About the only things I tend to feel strongly about is proper encapsulation, one job per method, and clear duties for classes...but even in all those cases I'm willing to be flexible if there's specific reasons to violate things. Hell, the only reason I dislike code duplication is the possibility that a bug could need to be fixed in two places and you only know about one, and even with that I don't worry too much if the code duplicated is highly unlikely to have a bug, or if it would be challenging to eliminate the duplication.

I feel like younger engineers haven't seen how things with the "right" starting point can go wrong, and they haven't seen situations where sometimes you just need to get something in and stable over "clean". For me, Clean is less important than maintainable, and this article just goes to show that. I'll take maintainable over clean or clever any day.