Please apply your cleverness not to write clever code, but to find clever ways to avoid the need for blatant cleverness.

What is reasonable code? In an article on The Whiteboard, a fellow software developer under the pen name “Jimmy Hoffa” thinks about reasonability as a measure of code quality. He arrives at six exemplary properties of reasonable code:

• small scope
• short stacks
• explicit data use
• explicit data ownership
• explicit outputs
• dictating instead of deciding

He makes a good case for continuous self-​improvement and a focus on code quality in our development process. It is well worth the read, especially for beginning professionals. And not quite by chance, it seems to be a subtle advertisement for functional programming and static typing: anything else would have a hard time meeting his characteristics of reasonable code.