"Really Good Programmers"

A young designer/developer/businessman I respect and admire twittered the following today:

"Really good ruby programmers can write code that is so clever that no one less talented than them has a hope of understanding it."

He really should know better.

Really good programmers can, indeed, write code so clever that no one less talented than themselves has any hope of understanding it--but they never do. That's the sort of thing really talented coders do before they become really good programmers. And then, in the code review, their peers tell them to take out the clever bit of code and make it maintainable, thereby vastly improving the code.

A decent piece of software has a lifetime measured in tens of years. During that time, it's likely to be looked at a dozen times for new features, bug fixes, and efficiency updates--not to mention the occasional port. If it took a day to write it initially, it'll probably spend many times that under someone's lens while it's in the maintenance phase. Taking 12 hours to write clear, comprehensible code instead of 8 hours to do something clever will save time in the long run. Is it always worth the extra time? No--but it is often enough that I try to do it every single time I code something.

Strange clever code is fun to write. I write a little self-modifying routine one time, both to prove I could do it, and to solve a timing issue--I counted op-codes and found I could squeeze pattern recognition between bytes on a 19.2kbps serial connection by making the polling routine self-modifying. Nowadays I'd comment it like crazy, and advise that it be removed as soon as CPU speeds increased enough to do so. Back then I wasn't a good enough programmer to know I needed to do that. Hadn't looked at enough of my own code, incomprehensible after 5 years of "rest", to know it was important to do so.

So Jon: educate that Ruby programmer of yours. Someday he'll thank you for it. All your maintenance guys will thank you for it, and you won't have to wait for that.