Clear is better than clever [pdf]
I&#x27;m fairly sure that we as a community can come up with an objective measure for the phrase &quot;clever code&quot;.  Something like:  Exploits implicit and&#x2F;or hidden details to correctly function.<p>However, I&#x27;ve never seen a convincing and objective description of clear code.<p>Sometimes people mean that clear code is verbose code.<p>Sometimes people mean that clear code is uniformly formatted code. [For best results we should manually format the code the same.  This builds character.  Automatically formatting will not be considered.]<p>Similarly, sometimes people mean code smells are unfamiliar code.  Or that code smells are patterns that they misused once and it bit them.<p>Objective methods of describing the ability for people to comprehend code when all else is equal do not exist as far as I have been able to see.  The best we have is cyclomatic complexity, but there&#x27;s some reason to believe that line count may be a better indicator (which can&#x27;t be good).  And cyclomatic complexity completely misses the effect of mutable or immutable state, the presence of bad APIs, poor variable naming, etc.