I don’t see how the specifics of Scala are related to this discussion. The same thing happened to me in C in fact back in the 00s when I was doing scientific computing for a government research lab that had a large and critical collection of C programs written between the late 80s and late 90s.
It happens to all programming languages when engineers don’t prioritize future-proof readability as a first class part of maintainability along with testing and judicious choices about when to invest in extensibility designs vs when to ignore extensibility.
when engineers don’t prioritize future-proof readability
What does it say about the competence of "future" engineers if they can't understand code written by past ones?
One of my favourite sayings is "the code is unreadable to you, because you are not qualified to understand it yet". Perhaps we should not encourage the degradation of our craft.
> “What does it say about the competence of "future" engineers if they can't understand code written by past ones?”
It doesn’t say much about those future engineers at all.
It’s easy to write inscrutable code that even veteran engineers can’t understand, yet still “gets the job done.”
Also, you act like this would imply that all future engineers are the same, but that is not true and not related to my points.
You’re writing code for the inexperienced future engineer, some poor soul tossed into a legacy codebase without much help. It’s not their fault they were put in that position. It’s sink or swim. Good code helps _that_ person swim.
As for the quote you mention,
> “One of my favourite sayings is "the code is unreadable to you, because you are not qualified to understand it yet".
That is a horrible way of thinking, with built in condescending attitudes and everything. If code is unreadable to someone, beyond basic syntax definitions, that is the author’s fault and not at all the reader’s fault for being inexperienced.
The reason 5th graders can’t read Infinite Jest is because David Foster Wallace tried to make it complicated, not because, in some skewed perspective, the writing is perfectly simple but 5th graders just aren’t experienced enough yet. It’s a complexity property of the writing not of the reader’s brain.
With literature you can get away with this because there are extenuating arguments about artistic merit.
For business software, not so. In that case, if you write something more like DFW and less like Hemingway, it’s a sign of laziness and lack of self-discipline.. and not at all a sign of skill advancement.
It happens to all programming languages when engineers don’t prioritize future-proof readability as a first class part of maintainability along with testing and judicious choices about when to invest in extensibility designs vs when to ignore extensibility.