Re: simpler question about my script

[Sysadmin Lists]

> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2022 21:11:42 -0500
> From: Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org>
> To: help-bash@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: simpler question about my script
> > 
> > That's an excellent list except for the (qualified) part about cleverness, 
> > IMO. If you read through old (I mean 70s and 80s) code, it's stuffed with 
> > cleverness. Being clever forces a deeper understanding of the language in 
> > use, forces brevity, and forces tight flow-control. It doesn't take away 
> > from readability if you comment your code well (which is also a dying art 
> > probably tied to the advice about cleverness). I see "avoid being clever" 
> > becoming "be lazy" in the real world.
> 
> I agree with Dennis here.  What you think is "clever" today is "unreadable
> gibberish, what the hell was I thinking" 6 months from now.  You're just
> hurting yourself.
> 
> Also bear in mind that programs written in the 1970s may have needed to
> work on extremely limited or bizarre systems.  Couple that with compiler
> optimizations being quite poor, and you had people trying desperately
> just to get *anything* to work.  It's not a fair comparison to today's
> needs.

I suspect we're not operating with the same definition of "cleverness" here. 
I've yet to see genuinely clever code that looked like gibberish; I've seen 
plenty of gibberish that was meant to be clever and wasn't. There is nothing 
more satisfying than a brilliantly written recursive function -- yet the "don't 
be clever" dictum would suggest not writing them. I've seen complex sed and awk 
scripts written in dozens-of-lines that today would take a dozen pages. The 
modern lack of mental rigor is telling.

And in many cases, lack of brevity leads to lack of readability. I've seen far 
too many bash and shell scripts that were twice as long as they needed to be. 
It's clear when forethought was lacking during their creation.

The "don't be clever" advice is one of those "feels good to say" mantras that 
get passed around in this industry, like "there's no right or wrong way to do 
things in [*nix|programming]." But there are good ways and bad ways to do 
things, and some good ways are better than others. I suppose the people that 
need to hear "don't be clever" are the ones that obey it anyway, so no harm 
done there.

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