In my opinion you should just try to solve each problem in the most natural manner, and maintainability will happen automatically.
I wasn't with you on the importance of maintainability until you said this. Yes, programming well and naturally is automatically maintainable.
Right on. Another way to put it: if you have to spend extra effort on maintainability, you've probably screwed up somewhere.
My name for this kind of behavior is "fetish". For example, some people have a Law of Demeter fetish. Some people have a short function fetish. And so on, all kinds of little cargo cults around.
Allow me to illustrate with another example. One of my recent projects is mostly composed of small functions, but there's this one function that is three screens long. What does it do? It draws a pie chart with legend. The only pie ch...
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