by rob05c

I call this mechanism Kernighan's lever. By putting in a small amount of motivation towards the short-term goal of implementing some functionality, you suddenly end up with a much larger amount of motivation towards a long term investment in your own personal growth as a programmer.

Something he doesn't address: how will new devs read your clever code?

His cycle: I write code as clever as I can. Then, when it breaks, I'm forced to become more clever to fix it. GoTo 1. I get that. But I have seven years' experience. How does a fresh undergrad understand my clever code, much less debug it?

Part of the answer is that great code isn't clever, or that great code, despite being clever, is still elegantly simple to understand.

But it isn't that simple. The value of cleverness is when it fixes something bad. For example, sometimes it's impossible to avoid duplicate code without metaprogramming. Is duplicate code less bad than the cleverness of metaprogramming? I find that hard to believe. Then where does that leave the freshman dev?