"“When asked, I would give people my opinion that maintainable code is more important than clever code,” he said. “If I encountered clever code that was particularly cryptic, and I had to do some maintenance on it, I would probably rewrite it. So I led by example, and also by talking to other people.”" This is very sage advice.
> This is very sage advice. I mean in real life (when you don't have Guido to do it for you), if people are writing code you can't understand then you need to tell them to fix it. And many people don't like being told they need to rewrite their code because you can't understand it, so it leads to conflict and eventually you often need to fire people. So yes, it's good advice, but by cleaning up engineering debt you'r…
There are people who simply refuse to understand generics and/or stream APIs. Which are to (most) programmers more readable then the same logic being drawn out in a loop.
Meanwhile some other programmer would just write code golf and brag about it.
At the end of the day, it should be about enforcing a coding style that defines what you can or can't do. Adding final to all variable that can be final for instance is a great start.