[tikhonj]

Well, no. Each individual piece in the child-like code might be easy to understand, but you lose the forest for the trees. You, as the reader, have to reconstruct how all the simple (simplistic?) pieces fit together to accomplish, well, whatever the code is supposed to do. Compared to over-abstracted code, you've just shifted the difficulty from understanding an explicit structure created by the programmer to mentally extracting the implicit structure of the code.

A good point of comparison is technical writing. Think back to the best textbooks you read: they didn't have the flourishes and sophistication of literary writing, but they still had a significantly richer structure and organization than, say, a children's book. They needed this richer structure to get their ideas across effectively. You can't write a coherent textbook in the style of Where's Spot?

The same goes for code. You can be too clever, sure, but you can also not be clever enough. On a scale from "Salman Rushdie" to "Clifford the Big Red Dog", you don't want to be at either extreme.

Is this hard? Yes! Writing readable code is a skill unto itself, distinct from writing working code. People don't always agree on what is and isn't readable, but that's true for writing too. Still a worthy goal, just one that doesn't lend itself to simple rules. You just have to build up the right skills from experience.

[bryanrasmussen]

Clifford the Red Dog is a perfectly acceptable level of clever for a batch script that extracts audio from mp4 files and saves it to mp3.

Not sure what level of clever Salman Rushdie is acceptable for?

[tikhonj]

Haha, great example—that's exactly what I want from my bash scripts too :). Just a simple list of commands.

Salman Rushdie style is reserved for libraries that make a massive impact. Learning abstractions like that is like learning a new part of the language so it has to really pay off. Rare but not impossible.

The Haskell lens[1] library is a great example. It's almost too clever for its own good and learning it is like learning a new programming language, but it is such an improvement for the entire codebase it's worth it. I use it widely at work and it pays for its own difficulty almost immediately. (It's also important that it can't achieve some of its core functionality without the "clever" things it does.)

The documentation could use a bit of work though :/.

[1]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/lens

[bryanrasmussen]

I've always thought Haskell was later James Joyce clever :)

I'm not sure if it is really appropriate for any code to be more than Robert Frost clever, sometimes think that should be clever enough for anyone. But this is only a periodic opinion.

on edit: I guess that means I'm saying no language needs to be more clever than Python.

[falcolas]

Containerization.

We don't talk about c-groups and compressed files with metadata, we talk about containers and images. We don't talk about individual machines running a number of highly specialized daemons with configuration files, cryptographic keys, and networks-in-networks, we talk about clusters and pods and gateways.

Notwithstanding that much of the code which has built up these sweeping generalizations is built of a tangle of red dogs, the abstractions are very high level and mean we rarely have to discuss infrastructure at a very low level.

Of course, there's a twist to that as well, that hearkens back to an earlier statement: the understanding have been limited to an extremely high level as well. The number of people who can troubleshoot a container cluster is small, and growing smaller. We've intentionally created cliff notes of "Salman Rushdie" novels and believe that's all the populace needs.