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by ackfoobar 1654 days ago
I sympathize with your thinking. There are two "readabilities".

1. How easy it is for an average programmer to understand the code.

2. How understandable the code actually is if the reader is fluent with that prior knowledge.

If one finds the latter is much better than code written in conventional techniques, but people are scared off by the former, it can get pretty frustrating, and "people are stupid" may be a conclusion drawn.

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But my experience is that those techniques do not yield better code.

And "Educate yourself" made me barf.

1 comments

So, I’ll probably get shit on for this, but I really cannot wait to leave this industry.

I hate how “best tool for the job” really just means “what we can have a large hiring pool of people who’ve only ever learned one programming style and possibly only one language of” or “for legacy reasons this is the only choice”.

Yes I’m familiar with reality, I just hate it.

Yes, it's disappointing but hardly surprising to see the phrasing of management parroted by so many developers. It's their job to worry about hiring, deadlines, etc. It's yours to make sure things don't shit the bed at one in the morning, especially if you're going to be paged about it. There are some languages that make it very easy for grads to deliver features, and others that are far more likely to be correct at compile time. The "best tool" is born from these competing demands; those too meek to engage with this inherently adversarial process don't do themselves or anybody else any favors.
Apparently "best tool for the job" means find he bottom of the barrel that can still engage somehow with the codebase. This Idiocracy went to the point where returning function pointers gets questioned during code review because "this might be too complex compared to imperative call".