Claus Höfele

Thread: I must admit, over the years I become less and less appreciative of the word "clean", when it comes to software development. I guess I have seen to many clean projects which were very buggy, or did not bring any values.

Clean is mainly a property of aesthetics. It can also be understood as not poisoned. However when we say - go clean your room, we don't mean make your room habitable. We mean - go and make you room look nice. Not even functional (easy to use), but just pleasant for an eye.

Same happens often with the code we write. We refactor the hell out of it to make it pleasant for an eye, but we often forget the most important thing. This code is just a means to an end. It solves some kind of a problem.

Don't get me wrong, it is important to keep the code base in a state, which is understandable, evolvable, performant and well tested. For this I would like to call the code base rather "healthy" than clean.

Health has multiple dimensions to it. You can be overweight, but still healthy. You can be an athlete and still have some kind of health issues.

Speaking of code bases: DRY is not always the healthiest choice, because it can slow you down evolving the code base. It could also in some cases have a negative effect on execution performance.