Code readability is just one of the goals we aim for while designing software, performance is another, stability is another, flexibility and ability to make changes is yet another.
While reading any code I tend to think about these tradeoffs and see if that hard to read code is actually hard for a reason or simply a mess because no one took care of it.
Writing dumb easy looking duplicate code is not optimal either, I don't see an issue with stable, fast and efficient code that's harder to understand yet works brilliantly. One can easily increase readability of such code by adding comments but one can't get performance, stability and flexibility by writing comments.
Optimising for dummies just because code is easier to debug isn't a good idea, often times I have to debug easy looking code only to find that it's not that easy in execution as it was in reading. Simple code often doesn't handle all the edge cases, abstraction less code is harder to maintain and change, easy code can't evolve and grow with business needs.
It's only when code is unreadable, buggy and slow that it starts to become a real mess.
Also a shout out to Rich Hickey's distinction between easy and simple, creating simple code requires a lot more effort and thought and is not easy to just read and modify by dummies.
While reading any code I tend to think about these tradeoffs and see if that hard to read code is actually hard for a reason or simply a mess because no one took care of it.
Writing dumb easy looking duplicate code is not optimal either, I don't see an issue with stable, fast and efficient code that's harder to understand yet works brilliantly. One can easily increase readability of such code by adding comments but one can't get performance, stability and flexibility by writing comments.
Optimising for dummies just because code is easier to debug isn't a good idea, often times I have to debug easy looking code only to find that it's not that easy in execution as it was in reading. Simple code often doesn't handle all the edge cases, abstraction less code is harder to maintain and change, easy code can't evolve and grow with business needs.
It's only when code is unreadable, buggy and slow that it starts to become a real mess.
Also a shout out to Rich Hickey's distinction between easy and simple, creating simple code requires a lot more effort and thought and is not easy to just read and modify by dummies.