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How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

chrismm.com

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Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#51

Post by jt2190 »

HerpDerpLerp wrote: post #31
jt2190 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christian points to Joel Spolsky's example of using prefixes to add meaning, not type information like your examples. From Joel's essay: All strings that come from [user input] must be stored in variables (or database columns) with a name starting with the prefix "us" (for Unsafe String). All strings that have been HTML encoded or which came from a known-safe location must be stored in variables with a name starting…

Yeh I don't like abbreviations in code so would have unsafeName = Request("name") etc etc which does not have that problem... unless 'unsafe' is a thing in your business domain then things could get complex :) The article goes on to advocate prefixing the methods that return safe and unsafe strings with 's' or 'us' I would hate that! I can easily see you ending up with string methods like safePadLeft and unsafePadLef…

I can easily see you ending up with string methods like safePadLeft and unsafePadLeft that do exactly the same thing but are named for where in the code they are used...

I don't follow. Since the argument type to either method would be the same (a string), why are two methods necessary? Or are you inferring that we define subtypes of String: SafeString and UnsafeString? And wouldn't subtypes inherit behavior from their parent?

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#52

Post by protonfish »

naringas wrote: post #11

I used to think that a lot of bad code out there was made by lazy, incompetent programmers... But then, after a certain job, I realized that this is probably not the case. Now I belive that most bad code out thare is made by overworked and tired programmers in a rush to deliver something that works.

In my experience, most bad code is written by dogmatic cargo cult programmers that are more interested in writing code that adheres to their pet development philosophy or framework instead of programming to solve a problem in the simplest way possible.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#53

Post by lostcolony »

'Avoid using language extensions and libraries that do not play well with your IDE'

I'm of the opinion this should be extended to "does not play well without an IDE". Because even in projects that said "everyone, use Eclipse(/IntelliJ/whatever)", and tried to share project files, there was constant pain in ensuring that everyone had the same development environment ("Oh, yeah, I made a local change to my project file, but then I also made a change that needed to be shared, and whoops, I broke everyone" and the like). Not to mention trying to work with code deployed onto boxes without an IDE. I've gotten to where "if I can't make sense of it and be productive in it with just vim, grep, and find, your code is too complex".

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#54

Post by HerpDerpLerp »

DonHopkins wrote: post #44
igl wrote: post #21

No one ever mentions formatting. I really like aligning multiline blocks, adding whitespace and useless braces here an there. e.g: Having just a single space between function name and arguments makes it look less like a call. Yet almost all lint presets/defaults forbid this. Typography is all about the whitespace between letters forming easily recognizable shapes.

I like to break lines and use indentation to line up repeated text, so you can see there is repetition, and so the parts that are different are obvious. A simple example: if ((mouse.x == 0) && (mouse.y == 0)) { scores more points than: if ((mouse.x == 0) && (mouse.y == 0)) {

maybe if(mouseIsAtOrigin()){

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#55

Post by megous »

hyperhopper wrote: post #34

Even the first example is a bit silly. Nobody is going to not understand that (null == foo) is the same as (foo == null).

Also, it can still catch bugs even in javascript. It's not related to C at all, as original article states.

Equality operator is commutative (sans operand side effects). It's not a quirk.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#56

Post by PaulHoule »

reacweb wrote: post #19
naringas wrote: post #11

I used to think that a lot of bad code out there was made by lazy, incompetent programmers... But then, after a certain job, I realized that this is probably not the case. Now I belive that most bad code out thare is made by overworked and tired programmers in a rush to deliver something that works.

Most of the bad code was made by very productive developers.

That's simply because the non-productive programmers don't write very much code, good or bad.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#57

Post by JoeAltmaier »

protonfish wrote: post #52
naringas wrote: post #11

I used to think that a lot of bad code out there was made by lazy, incompetent programmers... But then, after a certain job, I realized that this is probably not the case. Now I belive that most bad code out thare is made by overworked and tired programmers in a rush to deliver something that works.

In my experience, most bad code is written by dogmatic cargo cult programmers that are more interested in writing code that adheres to their pet development philosophy or framework instead of programming to solve a problem in the simplest way possible.

Isn't that just another philosophy? Lets be more charitable. Engineers are given limited time to do any job (time == money). So they do what they can. Mostly on a budget.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#58

Post by zeveb »

lostcolony wrote: post #53

'Avoid using language extensions and libraries that do not play well with your IDE' I'm of the opinion this should be extended to "does not play well without an IDE". Because even in projects that said "everyone, use Eclipse(/IntelliJ/whatever)", and tried to share project files, there was constant pain in ensuring that everyone had the same development environment ("Oh, yeah, I made a local change to my project file…

I agree completely and totally. A good programmer's text editor (e.g. vi or emacs) is far more general than an IDE, more easily extensible and rather more future-proof (folks will still be using emacs & vim in twenty years; will anyone be using Eclipse?).

Requiring an IDE is, to my mind, a symptom of a far-too-complex environment which will lead to breakage.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#59

Post by norswap »

Like often with this kind of article it barely scratches the surface.

"null != variable" will confuse people is downright silly. People confused by this won't have an inkling of what any non-hello-world program does.

The rest has some validity, but it focuses on syntax and programming in the very small. It might take a bit of effort, but I can make sense of a tangled function (that's not an excuse to code sloppily though).

The real challenges are architectural: understanding how an application is structured is often a daunting task, and yet there are some very simple things one can do to combat this, starting with grouping things thoughtfully, generous pointers in the documentation, and a few paragraphs of architecture overview in the readme file.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#60

Post by carussell »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #26
igl wrote: post #21

No one ever mentions formatting. I really like aligning multiline blocks, adding whitespace and useless braces here an there. e.g: Having just a single space between function name and arguments makes it look less like a call. Yet almost all lint presets/defaults forbid this. Typography is all about the whitespace between letters forming easily recognizable shapes.

Typography is much more than that, of course, but with fixed width plain text, you don't have many options...so ascii art it is. I'm pondering a language that includes formatting abstractions so that you can prepare code for reading along with its functionality (sort of like literate programming, but still starting from code). I would love to see comments in a side bar, long monotonous calls organized into tables, pr…

> I would love to see comments in a side bar

This is brilliant. A neat way to bootstrap getting this sort of thing implemented in most code editors would be to write a plugin that can do this for existing code and make it good enough to turn heads. It would extract documentation blocks to be presented as prose in a vertically split pane to the right and present the file itself with those blocks hidden—as if automatic folding were turned on. It could even apply some fairly simple heuristics to automatically link to other relevant comments. The goal should be an experience indistinguishable from an embedded iframe showing human-generated API docs from the Web.

Another thing I'd like to kill is the file tree that you see in most VCS Web frontends that tell you the last commit message that touched the file/directory, rather than about the structure of the code.

Netscape's old Bonsai tool tried to do something like this. (When Netscape open sourced Mozilla, they also opened up a lot of their internal tools. This is where Bugzilla came from, but there were others, too.) When you were looking at a directory listing, if the file contained what looked like a short description of its purpose in the comments near the top of the file, Bonsai would grab description and present alongside the file name.

In my own projects today, I try to always include a file overview containing a short, single line description and then write a paragraph or two going into further detail, documenting the whys of the code, and generally explaining its overall role in the project/justifying its existence. I'm basically writing for a tool that doesn't exist but that I'd like to see get created and gain widespread acceptance.

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