Code Readability Debate

Discussions focus on criticizing the readability, maintainability, and quality of a dense, obscure code snippet, debating conciseness versus clarity and whether more code or less is better.

➡️ Stable 0.6x Programming Languages
6,279
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#4896
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
14
2008
53
2009
122
2010
114
2011
196
2012
208
2013
302
2014
261
2015
257
2016
376
2017
346
2018
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2019
383
2020
414
2021
473
2022
569
2023
630
2024
492
2025
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2026
39

Keywords

BTW HELL OOP code bad code copilot code base bad writing code worthless wrote read codebase

Sample Comments

EvilEy3 Jun 11, 2021 View on HN

Code is worthless on it's own.

Kuraj Oct 4, 2018 View on HN

Code is harder to read than write.

mrits Aug 9, 2025 View on HN

Billy, it's becoming increasingly harder to believe you are writing this code yourself

CodeWriter23 Sep 27, 2023 View on HN

Paraphrasing: this code is unreadable so let me show you some code that is even harder to read.

w4yai Sep 11, 2025 View on HN

Spoiler : the code is not so bad

noisy_boy Aug 21, 2024 View on HN

aka Talk is cheap, show me the code.

landypro Feb 28, 2014 View on HN

That's hardly an excuse given the significance of this code.

aught Apr 23, 2025 View on HN

The urge to spagetti code is strong but must be denied.

kidbomb Jul 31, 2025 View on HN

// When I wrote this code, only Copilot and I understood what I did. Now only Copilot knows.

asdffdsa Oct 30, 2022 View on HN

Exactly, more code isn't better