← Back to context

Comment by erdo

5 years ago

> Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

Couldn't agree more

5 comments

erdo

Reply
xwolfi  5 years ago

Yeah it's striking how this is not the majority opinion even amongst seniors. I'm mid career I still have to ask people very experienced why they always jump on the most long-winded complicated way to solve a problem, often simple enough to require very little.

There is still to this day the idea that we're supposed to plan to future like oracles or pad our resumes on the company's dime.

b20000  5 years ago

which is why leetcode makes no sense, as it focuses on premature optimization and writing the most advanced code possible which no freshman will be able to understand, at least not without dissecting it for a few hours first.

  • fouc  5 years ago

    Isn't leetcode more about "passing" the technical interview white board questions? Not a reflection of what real world code looks like.

  • NaturalPhallacy  5 years ago

    And every one of the puzzles on there is by definition a solved problem. If the company went under and all of their code and website was lost, I would cheer.

    The only sort function I could write is probably bubble sort. Why? Because more efficient ones out there already exist and I could google them and paste 1000x faster than I could write them.

    Lazy programmers are efficient. Puzzle solving masturbators waste a ton of time.