Brent Simmons: How Not to Crash #9: Mindset

Brent Simmons has recently posted How Not to Crash #9: Mindset:

I used to think that means I should write code that’s about 80% as clever as I am. Save a little bit for debugging.

But over the years I’ve come to think that I should write code that’s about 10% as clever as I am. And I’ve come to believe that true cleverness is in making code so clear and obvious that it looks like nothing at all.

I’m on the same journey. I used to be proud that I could solve a problem in fewer lines of code. Now I’m proud of simple code. I’m still learning though and there are plenty of cases where my code doesn’t live up to my ideals.

Because its too clever.