[athanagor2]

The performance difference is truly savage.

But I think there is a reason for the existence of "clean code" practices: it makes devs easier to replace. Plus it may create a market to try to optimize intrinsically slow programs!

[spoiler]

It doesn't just make devs easier to replace. It makes it my job more pleasant (and that of my colleagues). But yes, you're right. It does also help onboard people.

Imagine working as a barista with a disorganised bar, a mat on the floor that keeps sliding and a corner is sticking up, and one bag of beans where half the side is decaf and the other is normal.

Now compare that to working in a more common sense coffee shop: everything is in its place, the mat isn't decrepit, and you have multiple bean bags.

In which one do you think it's easier to make coffee?

[js6i]

Huh? Coffee shops optimize for people not bumping into each other and having related items close together, and don't pretend to not know what kind of gear they have.. that's not a terrible analogy to the exact opposite argument.

[tizzy]

I think the sentiment is that order and organisation is helpful in achieving goals and cultivating a good working environment as opposed to a big mess. Analogies, just like abstractions, are leaky.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, but this one leaks a smart-matter paint that self-assembles into a shape of text saying "the order and organization is not the goal, but a consequence of ruthlessly optimizing for performance above all".

[spoiler]

I didn't try to say that, but maybe I confused my point with the analogy (like an earlier comment mentioned: they're imperfect).

I meant to say that organisation helps make work easier, including adding performance optimisations.

[drainyard]

It seems like you may be assuming that Casey is arguing against writing clear code, which he is not. He is arguing that you should just write the simple thing and usually that is also the most clear, readable and "maintainable" code because it is easy to get an overview of. So what he is arguing for does not fit your coffee shop example, because of course no one should write unreadable code. The argument is that sometimes taking a step back from how you were taught to write clean code, could be simplified in a way that is _also_ performant by default.

[KyeRussell]

This advice doesn’t really differ from the actual ‘source material’ though. It’s really arguing against the people that learned what “clean code” is from a blog post or a Tweet or (most likely of all) another YouTuber that tried to take a complex engineering topic that they don’t have the experience to understand, and shove it into a video-listicle full of DigitalOcean ads and forced facial expressions.

You see the same thing with microservices. Any of the reading material by the big / original proponents of microservices is actually quite good at giving you all the reasons why they probably aren’t for you. But that doesn’t stop the game of telephone that intercepts the message before it gets do most developers.

So I really just see this whole thing as someone saying “RTFM”, rather than it being any sort of derived nuanced take.

The sooner a professional software developer can get themselves off the treadmill of garbage trendy educational content, the better.

[mtrower]

> people that learned what “clean code” is from a blog post or a Tweet or (most likely of all) another YouTuber

Or, you know, college. Though I can only speak of my local tech college, not full blown university. I don't bear them any ill will --- there's a hell of a lot to try to teach in two years --- but a lot of the things that were taught in my degree, were very dogmatic.