This article presents a false dichotomy. There is no reason why you need to sacrifice code quality for the sake of speed of development. "Getting things done" is a hugely valuable skill, but don't conflate having that skill with meaning you are too busy to code clean. Productivity and beautiful code are not mutually exclusive.
I write very nice, commented JavaScript that employs consistent whitespace and indentation and validates in JSLint all day long. That's just how I do it and I'm way faster than the coworkers of mine who code things quick and dirty.
You reach a certain level of expertise and your code will just naturally have these qualities. It will be both beautiful and will be developed quickly. Senior talent gets this. Junior talent doesn't.
This was a thought provoking article though. The main takeaway is that "getting things done" is the most important skill a programmer can have which I completely agree with. For the sake of other developer's sanity, clean code is so important too. Ugly, sloppy code takes longer to read, more effort to maintain and is frankly demoralizing and tiresome to work with. Clean code for me is probably right underneath getting things done on a skills ranking. Ideally, good developers would have both...and my experience shows that good developers do.
If I had a nickel for every lint-clean properly indented file of spaghetti code I saw, I would have.... to be at my job, where we have tools and rules for surface appearance, but no accounting for quality in depth.
I write very nice, commented JavaScript that employs consistent whitespace and indentation and validates in JSLint all day long. That's just how I do it and I'm way faster than the coworkers of mine who code things quick and dirty.
You reach a certain level of expertise and your code will just naturally have these qualities. It will be both beautiful and will be developed quickly. Senior talent gets this. Junior talent doesn't.
This was a thought provoking article though. The main takeaway is that "getting things done" is the most important skill a programmer can have which I completely agree with. For the sake of other developer's sanity, clean code is so important too. Ugly, sloppy code takes longer to read, more effort to maintain and is frankly demoralizing and tiresome to work with. Clean code for me is probably right underneath getting things done on a skills ranking. Ideally, good developers would have both...and my experience shows that good developers do.