Junior dev: "I don't understand this code, therefore there must be something wrong with it. I'm gonna rewrite it."

Well, readability counts. Chances are the code is really bad as in hard to change or hard to debug.

@Huuugo readability is very important, but chances are junior dev are too inexperienced to know wth they are talking about (this one at least)

and also, how can you rewrite something you don't understand?

@DankestDev You appeal to authority. That's a common logical fallacy. You should rewrite your unreadable code.

Also, one does not need to know why some code works as long as its purpose is clear. Because you have commented and documented your code, right? Its purpose should be clear then.

Magically works?
*yeah, of course. it does every time*

@nulloperator I disagree. Readability is important, but this is what usually happens:

"Our junior devs do not understand SQL, so we rewrote everything to select * from table. We join and constrain data in PHP. Sure, it's less efficient, but we solve that with a giant redis layer, and more load balancers"

Too often I see security, data safety and integrity, orthogonality and efficiency sacrificed for readability.

If a junior dev starts rewriting code... He did not ask for help or noone felt responsible to help him...

Both things should be fixed...

And sometimes code ist complex, so even as a non junior dev you will have to ask...

If the junior dev does not want to learn and wastes time by being lone wolf instead of team player, well - fire him.

@apisarenco I completely disagree.

"You can make your code so complex there is no obvious bugs, or you can make it so simple there obviously are no bugs."
- not by me, but forgot the quote's author

From the zen of python:
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea

@apisarenco I think every complex problem can be divided into smaller, simpler chunks that are easy to understand. Complex problems often lead to bad solutions because it's hard to manage that complexity and not every dev is a software architect. For almost every point in your list I would expect a whole Module/package that solves that particular problem. E.g. Spring solves this sort of stuff quite nicely

@apisarenco
1. ORM
2. Key/value store
3. API gateway with plugged in AV
4. Don't really know what you mean by that
5. One interface per consumer and API versioning usually solve this

@rantalicious of course not. But then again an incompetent dev would always defend his code no matter how bad