Clean Code Is a Lie

Few books have influenced everyday software development as much as Clean Code. It taught a generation of engineers to value readability, naming, small functions, and clarity. I learned from it too, and, like many others, I tried to apply its principles wherever I could. But the broader message behind it is often taken too far. Readability is not the main goal of software engineering. It is a tradeoff. And once a tradeoff is turned into a rule, like the book does many times, the outcomes start to