What makes a good program: simplicity over complexity

Beginner programmers often think good code is clever code: intricate, dense, impressive. The experienced know the opposite: the best code is boring code that is easy to understand.

The reason is simple. A program is written once but read dozens of times — by colleagues, by your future self, by whoever fixes it at three in the morning. Complexity that could have been avoided is not a sign of mastery but a debt that someone later pays in time and errors. Real mastery is making the complex simple, not the simple complex.

This rule reaches far beyond code. In any work there is a temptation to complicate things in order to look smarter or more indispensable. But systems — a program, a law, an instruction — serve people the better the more clearly they are built. Tangled complexity almost always hides either weak thinking or someone’s interest.

My opinion: simplicity is not primitiveness but the highest form of thought. Whoever can explain the complex simply has truly understood it; whoever hides behind complexity most often has not understood it themselves.