I’ve had the opportunity to work with lots of mechanical engineering corps to date, and I can confidently tell you: Even if they had some platonic ideal, they would never be able to follow through. The mediocrity of their software development practices is… profound. On all levels of the hierarchy. Sure they care about the ideal of sustainable software development, but they just can’t do it.

On the other hand, my employer advertises clean code as a service, and this attracts the kind of developers you describe.

Because code is read more often than written? And clean code is easier to read?

> clean code is easier to read

What's "clean code"?

Capital-C Clean Code? Hell no. This is code that looks clean only on the surface, but in practice it only works on toy projects. Anything big enough is impenetrable for debugging and a performance catastrophe.

Lowercase "clean code" from people who heard the above but never even read the book? What's that anyway? Nine out of ten times, this is just developers putting aesthetic preferences in front of correctness, simplicity and performance.

Wrong. Performance and correctness/cleanness go together. Perhaps you have never tried generating correct code that is ways faster than what you can write by hand.

Once again: what even is “cleanliness”? Are you writing it in lowercase on purpose, or are you unaware of methodologies that share the term? Or are you talking about Uncle Bob’s but refusing to capitalize?

“Clean” is a horrible qualifier for code. It is either too subjective/broad, or too loaded.

OK, I realized it was about something else. I don't follow Uncle Bob, and was referring to some people justifying "unclean"/incorrect shortcuts to gain performance.

I totally agree with you in that regard, "readable" and "performant" often go hand in hand. My gripe is with the "Clean" adjective, that often indicates code that actually isn't readable and is also low performant.

Code is run more than it is read especially if you count users. And so-called "clean" code is a performance disaster[0]. It's also, if that link is an accurate representation of what "clean" code is, a readability disaster. The more readable code, in my opinion anyway, is the version that is also an order of magnitude faster.

[0]: https://www.computerenhance.com/p/clean-code-horrible-perfor...