The Burden of Cleverness
Why write five lines of clear code when you can write one line of 'clever' code? A reflection on the maintenance costs of showing off.
There is a specific phase in every engineer's career where we discover the power of our tools. We learn about higher-order functions, metaprogramming, and bitwise operations. Suddenly, a simple loop feels pedestrian. Why write five lines of clear code when you can write one line of "clever" code?
Clever code is often just a bug waiting for a maintenance window. The goal of software engineering is not to prove how smart you are, but to prove how sustainable your solution is.
The One-Liner Trap
We've all seen it (and likely written it): the dense chain of.reduce(),.map(), and nested ternaries that performs a complex transformation in a single expression. At the moment of writing, it feels like a triumph. It feels efficient.
But code is read far more often than it is written. When you or a teammate returns to that line six months later to fix a bug, the cleverness becomes a burden. You have to decompress the logic in your head, rebuilding the state at every step of the chain.
Complexity as a Proxy for Value
The Resume Driver
We are incentivized to solve hard problems. Consequently, we sometimes manufacture hardness where none exists. We introduce microservices for a monolith-sized problem or a graph database for tabular data, just to say we did.
The Abstraction Tax
Premature abstraction is the most common form of cleverness. We create a generic engine to handle a single use case, paying the upfront cost of complexity for a future flexibility that never arrives.
Kindness in Coding
Writing simple code requires confidence. It takes experience to look at a problem and say, "A for-loop is the best tool here." It takes humility to write code that a junior developer can understand immediately.
Your code is a letter to your future self and your teammates. Be kind. Write boring code.
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."