Re:Don't DRY Your Code Prematurely
by jghn on Thursday May 30, 2024 @04:03PM
(#40527988)
The one gotcha with optimizing for “readability” is that at least to some extent it’s a metric that is in the eye of the beholder. Over the years I’ve seen far too many wars over readability during code review when really people were arguing about what seemed readable *to them*
[ Parent
| on HN ]
This is the reason I refuse to use the word "clean" to describe code anymore. It's completely subjective, and far too many times I've seen two people claim that their preferred way of doing things is better because it's "clean", and the other's way is worse because it's "less clean", no further justification added. It's absolutely pointless.
There are a lot of topics in software development where everyone can agree that X is correct. However, *defining* X gets into subjective arguments. And yep, readability and clean code are both in that category.