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Comment on Ask HN: How to Create “Boring” Software?

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I interpret it as not writing "clever" code, as in, code that uses obscure features or otherwise not obvious logic for no good reason, making it less readable. I wish I could give you some examples of what I mean, but I can't think of anything right now.

I wish I could give you some examples of what I mean, but I can't think of anything right now.

I got one. I almost wrote a monstrosity the other day involving a nasty heap of reflection in order to make a program more generic and reusable. I ended up defeating half of the polymorphism and type system features of the language I was using.

In the end there was no “good way” to solve the problem thanks partially to artificial constraints, but I rewrote it so that at least one could get a reasonable idea of what the code was doing.

"Clever" code reminds me of Cowboy Coding [1] where people do something similar. But I wonder if there is more to "boring" than what not to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding

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