Clear is better than clever [pdf]

Re:Clear is better than clever [pdf] by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @04:28AM (#19847520)

It really is a balance, and it's very hard to get it "just right". I mean I can appreciate a succinct oneliner (which is why I really like functional programming, doing a .map() instead of a for loop for example; it's a lot more compact without losing expressiveness, however, you do need to learn the lingo at first).

When I first went from Java to Scala, I found that while you can perform the same logic in 10 times less lines of code, each line is also 10 times as powerful and complex. A random example I found in code from back then:

    private def fetchDevices = (for (device <- devices.find()) yield device.getAs[String]("deviceId").get).toList

Super concise but at the same time the code doesn't actually do much as far as I can decode now, it's a lot of type wrangling.

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Re:Clear is better than clever [pdf] by tomxor on Tuesday May 07, 2019 @09:17AM (#19849039)

> It really is a balance, and it's very hard to get it "just right".

Yup, and you will find bad examples at both ends of the spectrum. And sometimes it doesn't even have anything to do with terse vs verbose, it's just bad code, not because of that one part of code but because of the context requiring it - just like in your example, I don't know scala, but if it's doing a lot of "type wrangling" then the real problem is probably further upstream from that point in the code, and no amount of terseness or verbosity is going to make it more clear - we are only discussing one dimension of the many subjective and objective dimensions that make code clear or confusing.

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