3min chapter

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Rationally Speaking #233 - Clive Thompson on "The culture of coding, and how it’s changing the world"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

CHAPTER

Code Is Efficient, It Smells Bad

When code is efficient, they talk about it as sort of clean, beautiful, elegant. And then when it's like a terribly written mess, the metaphor is that it smells bad. So I was just thinking about that metaphor because I love metaphors that kind of like work on multiple levels or reveal something deep about the thing they're metaphorizing. It seemed to me like the reason that the bad smell, like this code smells bad seems like such a good metaphor for what coders face there.

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