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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

#101

Post by JustSomeNobody »

mc808 wrote: post #74
njharman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, I'm not even sure what's suppose to be confusing? That the "constant" comes first, before the comparison operator?

Yoda speak, it is confusing like. Most people think "if the variable is not null" rather than "if null, the variable is not". It's easy enough to adapt to the style if it's used consistently throughout a code base, but that effort yields no benefits in most languages.

Most people think "if the variable is not null"

Only because this is how people are traditionally taught to think. This can be untaught easily enough.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#102

Post by carussell »

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…

Someone wrote a post a while back about this topic and called it the grep test. See: http://jamie-wong.com/2013/07/12/grep-test/

It's funny that you mention the Java ecosystem as one of the worst offenders, since the nature of the language itself and the culture around best practices in the early days should have put it in a particularly favorable position here. This is covered partly in another great post titled "Java for Everything": http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everything...

Unfortunately, I too find most Java projects are developed in a way that make them completely unapproachable without the assistance of an IDE. I'm secretly hoping that Microsoft announces first-class support for Android app development in VSCode, given that the team's overall gestalt is on producing a nimble, code-oriented editor. They may not otherwise have any incentive to make that kind of thing happen, except that I think it would be a real boon for VSCode adoption. Anxiously waiting to see if there will be any interesting announcements to come out of their developer conference this weekend, although I'm not counting on it.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#103

Post by chimprich »

ktRolster wrote: post #67
mathattack wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both. Some of my worst code was to look at someone else's code after a manager shouted "FIX THIS NOW!!!" with some kind of quick and dirty hack, and then never going back to get it done right. I'm pretty sure this happens independent of whether or not I am any good. :-)

When you're really good, you learn to FIX IT NOW while also not making a hack. Your code becomes flexible enough to handle that kind of change.

You can't anticipate every emergency change required to the codebase. Sure, you can make some intelligent predictions about certain points in the code and encapsulate possible changes but it's impossible in the general case. Trying to code to future possible requirements is often far more harmful because of over-abstraction than occasionally having to perform a quick hack and then fix it later.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#104

Post by xentronium »

lucaspiller wrote: post #91
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.

This is one thing I do too, and what really bugged me when I first tried Go. As an example I will align equals signs like this: loggedIn = foo isAdmin = bar It doesn't look like much, but when you are glancing over code it really helps to quickly read it.

And then you add `isCurrentlyAllowedToReadPosts = baz` and all your nifty formatting breaks.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#105

Post by batguano »

koder2016 wrote: post #80
protonfish wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A fashionable framework on your CV will get you an interview, while claiming that the code was simple won't. It's as immoral as objective reality is.

Good point. It's similar to the fallacy of measuring coder productivity by "lines of code written."

Reminds me of the anecdote about Bill Atkinson: His manager required a "productivity" form that asked "how many lines of code did you write this week?" Having just refactored QuickDraw, with vast gains in speed and simplicity, answered "-2000."

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#106

Post by woodman »

HerpDerpLerp wrote: post #54
DonHopkins wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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()){

That really only makes sense if you've got a 40 year old code base that supports every platform conceived, some of which have mouse origins that are -42.333f or can only be determined at run time.

Take a look at the source for tcsh, this is exactly how it is done there. Unless you're interested in supporting a long dead platform - it makes things unnecessarily complex. I love tcsh, but so many ifdefs in so many static functions...

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#107

Post by retbull »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #99
jimbokun wrote: post #72

"Avoid using language extensions and libraries that do not play well with your IDE. The impact they will have on your productivity will far outweigh the small benefit of easier configuration or saving a few keystrokes with more terse syntax." This is the main reason to avoid Spring. Having so much critical code in XML and properties configuration files, annotations, and magical interfaces that somehow sprout implemen…

Because it is much better to let misspellings get caught during run time than compile time. /s Same with a lot of the DI frameworks that were so popular for a while. New guy doesn't wire something up correctly, checks it in and everyone spends the next 3 hours debugging a rabbit hole. (OK, slight exaggeration.)

I spent 3 weeks on a spring rabbit hole as a new dev. Not exactly the easiest thing to get a hang of.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#108

Post by pyrextamer »

norswap wrote: post #59

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 th…

What if the order depended on the check condition?

`if (null == variable) or if (false == variable)` reads well that you are checking for null/false.

`if (variable != null) or if (variable != false)` reads well that you want non-null/false conditions.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#109

Post by strommen »

hbt wrote: post #27

There are so many similarities between writing code and writing English. - Thinking of paragraphs as functions with one purpose - keeping sentences short to reduce load on working memory and increase comprehension - create visual breaks to help the reader by grouping common stuff together as mini-functions - reduce intimidation factor of reading by removing convoluted stuff - remove cognitive noise (dead code, unnece…

Based on your list of how you like to write English, I agree. But I think your list is way off-base when it comes to human languages.

The beauty of human language is that it allows us to express our individuality as humans. There are an infinite number of ways to write the same thing, and each author can have a unique style based on how they choose their words, structure their sentences, etc. This is fantastic, and is truly one of the pillars of a free society. Consider "Newspeak" in Orwell's 1984 - its entire purpose was to eliminate free thought by eliminating choices in writing and speech.

Now in computer programming, I think unique styles are to be strictly avoided. A Newspeak-ish programming language that minimized the ability to write "creatively" would actually be pretty nice.

Re: How to reduce the cognitive load of your code

#110

Post by Fargren »

hinkley wrote: post #48
hbt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing most programmers overestimate is their own working memory i.e the number of things you are retaining when writing a piece of code. Problem is: working memory is short term. After a few days, you revisit that code and you realize how much it costs to load it all in your head again. Basically, we need code reviews of code we wrote last week as opposed to code we wrote yesterday.

The code I'm working on now, and the code I worked on before that, was designed to be memorized. I suspect the only reason the team is productive is that they are working from long term memory most of the time. The insidious things about this are twofold. First, it makes all new team members look like idiots. These other guys are getting work done, what's your problem? Our problem is we can't figure out wtf is going…

Unit tests tell you what that small thing you did ages ago was meant to do, and what it does in different circumstances. If you have the discipline to thoroughly test your code(and the knowhow to not write brittle tests), it can really pay off.
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