"Somebody who can program" have written probably 99% of used applications in the world today. From Bill Joy to Donald Knuth to David Cutler to Linus Torvalds to Guy Steele to Jamie Zawinsky to Guido van Rossum to John Carmack, and almost everyone in between.
Great programmers somehow only appear to write books and give pristine examples of how you build infinitely extensible architectures.
John Carmack produces the most maintainable and readable codebases. I happen to have the Quake3 source code up on my github at, so you can see for yourself:
Have you read how each of them actually write their code? Both write them precisely how the other poster noted.
And I've read the Quake 3 code extensively. Great code, but certainly not pristine, and I'm sure if you handed it to code review to virtually anyone you know, they'd find a whole bunch of sylistic and architectural issues with it. Like take a look at the playerDie code. You're telling me you wouldn't have said, "Rewrite this?" if you a colleague handed this to you?
And yes, Knuth is the author of literate programming, but that's not how the code started out. Read his letters on computer science.
Tarjan wrote a similar thing, I think in his ACM Turing Award lecture.
I picked those names because they are the best our industry has. But even with that, they all pretty much write code the way the previous post noted.
Great programmers somehow only appear to write books and give pristine examples of how you build infinitely extensible architectures.