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There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

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Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#221

Post by Planktonne »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #163
bojan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PS2. Oh and on 'code reviews': It would be cool if code-reviews were done "anonymously" i.e I should not know until the very end WHO wrote the code. Helps to keep any personal biases at bay - my 2cents. This is a generally good idea, but in small teams it can't really work. Code is in that sense a bit like handwriting, everyone has their own style, and after a long enough time in a small team you learn to recognize…

Yea true, and not just the code-signature, also the problem or jira-tickets the code is addressing. I.e If i'm reviewing a backend-api ticket I KNOW it's prob NOT the new Frontend-UX hippie we hired :P > everyone has their own style, Which then you can asked is that not ALSO a red-orange-flag ? Should one of the metrics not be to be as 'uniform' as possible ? But I do get your point even with uniform guidelines etc,…

> Should one of the metrics not be to be as 'uniform' as possible ?

I don't think so; someone's code 'handwriting' always seems to me to be more about how they think about problems than specific syntax conventions.

Everyone working on the same codebase should follow stylistic conventions - where do you put the opening bracket, how do you name functions etc. - but that still leaves a lot of room for personal style/approach. Faced with the same problem, two programmers might solve it in two different-but-valid ways, and that's recognisable.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#222

Post by marcos100 »

CipherThrowaway wrote: post #218
jcbrand wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in university I had an experience that was really instructive. For a project we had to write a program that differentiates mathematical equations. I dove in and just started writing code. Eventually, I realized that I had made a design error and that my code was much more complicated and cumbersome than it needed to be and I was getting stuck due to the complexity of the monstrosity I created. Unfortunately I fi…

I think this is the kind of thing you learn at uni and then potentially unlearn later on. Over the years I became better at using code to explore problem spaces and as a design tool. Nowadays I feel that incremental design delivers better results in less time than upfront design.

I think your incremental design delivers better results because you already know or at least have a hunch of what wouldn't work and avoid that. You have an abstract architecture when starting and change accordingly on the fly, while programming, using your own best practices.

Top down and bottom up architecture have their places. Being extreme in favor of one side is usually bad, as almost anything in life.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#223

Post by andi999 »

klodolph wrote: post #198
andi999 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In c++ a class declared with the keyword 'class' is private by default, and a class declared with the keyword 'struct' is public by default. So if you want public by default just write 'struct' (somehow this is not commonly known). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B_classes

I think the “somehow” is not too hard to guess… it is easy to think that “class” is the only way to declare a class, especially since “struct” is taken from C. I’m sure very few intro C++ explanations ever mention “struct” as a way to declare a class.

Yes, I meant common introductory material should mention (and use) it (I think Bjarne does mention it, but I wouldnt call it introductory material)

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#224

Post by matwood »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #135

So True ! After 25+ years of coding, I know one thing. I STILL don't know how to "code correctly". And apart from a few gifted individuals (Rob Pike, Fabrice Bellard Bobby Bingham [ffMpeg team] etc) I'm HIGHLY suspicious of ppl and programmers who claim "they can program correctly" and that "this xyz is the correct way/stack/method/arch". Background:CS grad, start coding at around 13 (thank you dad !) I am well verse…

No code survives first contact with the user. Code is messy because of the impedance mismatch between the (mostly) precise world of computers and the real world. So, we do the best we can knowing that 'correct' is always just over the next hill.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#225

Post by bschwindHN »

jcbrand wrote: post #168
skohan wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more code I've written, the less I care about code quality. I think the things I could point to in my coding practice which would make the code I write now better than the code I wrote 10 years ago would be: - I minimize interdependencies (changing a line of code should not affect something un-related) - I go for abstractions later, only when I need them, rather than trying to think of the perfect abstraction/des…

Back in university I had an experience that was really instructive. For a project we had to write a program that differentiates mathematical equations. I dove in and just started writing code. Eventually, I realized that I had made a design error and that my code was much more complicated and cumbersome than it needed to be and I was getting stuck due to the complexity of the monstrosity I created. Unfortunately I fi…

Weeks of programming can save you hours of planning!

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#226

Post by lmm »

bsza wrote: post #194
lmm wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make the loop operation something that's passed into the method. Or maybe replace the flag with polymorphism if there's some logical value that it really belongs on.

The second one is impractical because the number of classes you'd need would increase exponentially with each added flag. The first one clashes with > Prevent over-configurability, because you're accepting an infinite range of possible callback methods instead of asking a simple yes/no question. I don't get why this rule even exists, actually. If you take three boolean arguments, that's not okay, but if you wrap them…

> the number of classes you'd need would increase exponentially with each added flag.

Only if you actually call it exponentially many different ways, which seems unlikely.

> I don't get why this rule even exists, actually. If you take three boolean arguments, that's not okay, but if you wrap them all into a configuration object and pass that instead, that's suddenly... okay?

Three or four booleans are not something semantically meaningful that you can reason about. Five or six classes representing the cases that actually occur in your program, that's something you can understand. Often passing a callback function is too.

Boolean flags fall into a hole in the middle somehow, probably because of the exponentially many possible combinations; they look like a finite set of possibilities, but in practice you almost certainly haven't tested all the cases and a lot of them probably don't make sense.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#227

Post by zoomablemind »

skohan wrote: post #154
bojan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PS2. Oh and on 'code reviews': It would be cool if code-reviews were done "anonymously" i.e I should not know until the very end WHO wrote the code. Helps to keep any personal biases at bay - my 2cents. This is a generally good idea, but in small teams it can't really work. Code is in that sense a bit like handwriting, everyone has their own style, and after a long enough time in a small team you learn to recognize…

My biggest problem with code reviews is that they are so often without value. Code review should be a chance for teams to learn from each other, catch issues, and align on coding practices and strategies. In my experience, a lot of the time code reviews are either just a task - where people try to find superficial "mistakes" just to tick a box, or worse a chance for certain colleagues to power trip and try to get oth…

> ... Code review should be a chance for teams to learn from each other, catch issues, and align on coding practices and strategies.

IMO a practical benefit of a routine code review is just a shared understanding. As simple as that. Does the code look to be doing what it says it should do? Do the tests express the intended behavior?

Of course, the style, the quality of code could be of attention too, but that's extras, in my opinion, as long as the functionality is understood and confirmed.

I like relating this to an effort of understanding someone who speaks with an accent, be it a local dialect or foreign-originated. It does require some tolerance, but the shared understanding is the goal.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#228

Post by nthj »

skohan wrote: post #173
jcbrand wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in university I had an experience that was really instructive. For a project we had to write a program that differentiates mathematical equations. I dove in and just started writing code. Eventually, I realized that I had made a design error and that my code was much more complicated and cumbersome than it needed to be and I was getting stuck due to the complexity of the monstrosity I created. Unfortunately I fi…

Yeah this just hasn't been my experience. If you're working on a house you measure twice and cut once because the cost of reworking physical materials is a lot more expensive than the cost of doing a second measurement. If you could delete half your house and re-build it at zero cost, it might be more valuable to just go for the first attempt and learn from it rather than trying to do everything in theory up front. I…

I’ve found people often overlook that while code can be very quickly deleted, gigabytes or terabytes of production data is a huge pain to ETL later. Investing in the data model upfront has huge payoffs for your code and avoiding ETLs later on.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#229

Post by yakubin »

addicted wrote: post #175
yakubin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you follow them you will end up with code that's really nice to read and easier to maintain, and, most importantly, that you can confidently change. I found that a lot of those guidelines lead to the exact opposite. Examples: - Prefer polymorphism to if/else or switch/case (oh, the joy of tracing a simple task through 50 files) - Use dependency injection (same as above) - Hide internal structure (that "private"…

If you’re just using your classes as data records, most languages have better options for you. Java has the record type. C# has struct and also property members that serve the same purpose. I bet C++ and Rust also have better options for data records than plain classes.

Unfortunately, Rust doesn't. Rust only has "struct"-s, no classes, and they're private by default. Enums require the "pub" keyword once before a variant name, and once inside tuple associated with the variant. So often it's two "pub" keywords per line in an enum definition. So after writing code for a while, I then, upon compilation, need to fix up tens of "pub" occurrences. Pretty annoying. Wasted time, and the end result is hideous.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#230

Post by stack_framer »

I once joined a new company and got stuck in the middle of a PR from hell.

What should have been a quick bug fix (maybe 10 lines of code), turned into weeks and weeks of being told to rename, reorganize, and restructure aspects of the fix and surrounding code in order to adhere to a variety of undocumented conventions.

Despite following patterns used elsewhere in the very same files, my code was deemed brittle, confusing, and poorly tested (we don't do this, we're trying not to do that).

I patiently addressed each item of feedback, but of the dozens and dozens of PR comments, not one was ever about the accuracy of the logic that fixed the bug.

Welcome aboard!

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