Kernighan's law

programming

'Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.'

Brian Kernighan wrote it with P. J. Plauger in The Elements of Programming Style (1974), and it has been the standing verdict on cleverness ever since. The law does not forbid sophistication; it prices it, in future-you's debugging capacity at 3 a.m. Code review's most useful question is Kernighan's law in interrogative form: will we understand this in six months?

← All glossary entries