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A comment on A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game.

Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by JohnFen on Monday September 23, 2019 @09:51AM (#21048913)
Reflecting back over my career, I think I can safely say that my most brilliant moments of engineering insight lay buried in code like this -- invisible and unknown, probably for the rest of time.

The idea that some day, some researcher may reverse-engineer one of these things tickles me.

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Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by guitarbill on Monday September 23, 2019 @12:23PM (#21050388)
In a game that has to ship, it's fine. In a product that needs to be maintained for a while at least, I personally try to avoid brilliant code. I'd like to say it's out of empathy for co-workers, but it's really to keep myself sane when I need to change my own code in 3 months time.
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Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by Wowfunhappy on Monday September 23, 2019 @12:38PM (#21050582)
Your code also presumably doesn't have to run on an Atari 2600.
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Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by JohnFen on Monday September 23, 2019 @12:53PM (#21050759)
> I personally try to avoid brilliant code.

"Brilliant" code that is hard for engineers to understand is not necessarily brilliant code.

The things I consider to be my finest moments are not opaque in that way.

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Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by karmakaze on Monday September 23, 2019 @03:10PM (#21052427)
Perhaps why game devs don't call themselves software engineers.
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Re:A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game by acomjean on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @08:46PM (#21066412)
I had a professor (who was in industry for a while) tell us to "code smart, not cleverly."
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