🧼 Help, I Have Clean Code OCD – A Functional Programming Horror Story

#humor #cleancode #devlife #productivity

"Hi, my name is Yash, and I haven’t mutated a variable in 147 days."

They say the first step is acceptance. But how do you accept that your life has become a series of pure functions and monads? That you've spent more time refactoring than writing actual features? That you once rejected a PR because someone used a let instead of a const?

Welcome to my story — a tale of one dev’s descent into the rabbit hole of functional programming and clean code purity.

📖 The Backstory: I Was Just a Developer Once

I used to write code that worked. It wasn’t elegant, but it was honest. We called APIs. We mutated objects. We had deeply nested conditionals.
It wasn’t beautiful — but it shipped.

My files were big, my variables were vague, and my linter? Mostly decorative.

And then one day... I discovered eslint --fix.

That led me to Clean Code. Then FP. Then a YouTube video where someone used a curried function to build an entire REST API. I was horrified… and inspired. I thought, “If this guy can refactor CRUD into existential math, so can I.”

What started as a pursuit of better code quickly became a full-blown personality trait.

Last night, I spent two hours to refactor something that already works. Why?

🚿 It Started Innocently…

Like all good horror stories, mine began with a desire to do better. One day I saw a talk by Uncle Bob and thought, “Yes, I too want my codebase to be so clean it could do surgery.”

So I started small:

No console.log in production code ✅
One function per concern ✅
No mutation ever ✅

But once I read about functional programming, that's when everything changed. I was already in the cult.

🌀 The Pure Function Spiral

At first, map and filter were fun little tools. Like new LEGO pieces.

Then came:

Composing functions like an orchestral symphony 🎼
Refusing to write a single if 💀
Judging colleagues for using variables with more than one responsibility

Eventually I was:

Turning state management into a philosophical debate about immutability
Writing code that passed all linter rules... and failed all human readability tests
Creating tiny functions with 100% test coverage that did absolutely nothing useful

I even had a function called normalizeData that was composed of 11 smaller functions — none of which were longer than 3 lines. Beautiful. Useless. Like modern art.

🧠 The Symptoms

You may also be infected with Clean Code OCD if:

You have more types than actual data
You use the word “side effect” in casual conversation
You believe null is a personal insult
You’ve said, “I can’t approve this PR; it’s not referentially transparent”
You get physically uncomfortable around uncurried functions

Worst of all, this obsession spreads. One code review at a time. One Slack thread about "function purity" at a time. I've seen strong, pragmatic devs fall under its spell after just a single exposure to fp-ts.