Clarity over Cleverness

I was reading The Art of Unix Programming out of curiosity, and its a great document/book that brings lots of thoughts about modeling and clean interfaces design that was learnt from the creation of the Unix OS. In the Book it has many great topics and discussions, and one that stuck with me and I keep thinking about it is under Basics of the Unix Philosophy:

And oh boy have I tried to be clever in my code 😅. I’ve seen many times code that are clever but for me to notice that its clever it took me more than a hour to go though 20-30 lines of code. It might seem like a good code but we need to take in considerations multiple factors such as:

All of this questions should go through our head when writing a code, we need to remember that piece of code will probably outlive everyone tenure in the company - if you consider very old companies even outlive you 👀.

Because maintenance is so important and so expensive, write programs as if the most important communication they do is not to the computer that executes them but to the human beings who will read and maintain the source code in the future (including yourself).

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