By now, we should have a pretty clear picture of what we mean when we say clean code. In the previous chapter, we explored the tenets of reliability, efficiency, maintainability, and usability. Together, these guide us toward cleaner code, but if we aren't careful, we can still get caught out. In this chapter, we'll explore the enemies of clean code: things that may prevent us from writing code that is reliable, efficient, maintainable, or usable.

None of these enemies should be considered your enemies; instead, they should be thought of as agitators of clean code. We need to take a holistic view of these potentially harmful factors and keep an eye out for them in our code bases, teams, and workplaces.

Specifically, the enemies we'll be covering in this chapter include the following:

• Enemy #1 – JavaScript
• Enemy #2 – Management
• Enemy #3 – Self
• Enemy #4 – The cargo cult