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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

#321

Post by skohan »

edwnj wrote: post #282
skohan wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. I feel like I have seen this play out a number of times in my career: - New engineer joins a team with a mature codebase - New engineer complains about code quality, convinces management on a total rewrite to improve code quality - New codebase starts out simple and elegant - Eventually the codebase gets just as bulky and convoluted as the old one, because the ugliness was just a reflection of the complexit…

I think your mistaking technical debt for code quality. I've seen the same thing play out and more often than not, its a helix like cycle of projects starting simple and as time goes on trade offs are made and you get a lot technical debt then you rewrite and the cycle begins again. I partly agree with you about "ugly=not written by me", I just think that only happens at the edges aka semantics.. Nowadays its pretty…

I partially agree that there is a cyclical aspect to code rewrites and cruft accumulation. I still think a lot of time the perception that code is poorly written gets applied to complexity which is not yet understood rather than objectively poorly written code.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#322

Post by acuozzo »

theonething wrote: post #39
ahmaman wrote: post #29

Clean code is code that does what you expect it to do without many surprises. It is simple, not clever. Effortless to follow. Each part handles one idea at a time, at the same abstraction level. Doesn't force you to mentally juggle many balls at the same time. The code often tells you a story, it communicates how the programmer (author) described the problem, the solutions and the trade-offs. Very similar to writing.…

In my work history, I've never come across code like this, especially "effortless to follow". All the codebases I've worked with have been head scratch causing balls of mud. Am I unlucky or is what you are describing the rare exception?

FWIW, the following is the best code I've come across in my career.

https://github.com/bilibili/vlc/blob/master/modules/video_fi...

https://github.com/bilibili/vlc/blob/master/modules/video_fi...

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#323

Post by richardfey »

CapsAdmin wrote: post #191
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…

> PS2. Oh and on 'code reviews': It would be cool if code-reviews were done "anonymously" Outside of work in the free and open source community, I find myself often wishing that I could just get a random person who has no context of the codebase to review a piece of code I've written. Context is obviously important, but the lack of context can also highlight issues that you would be blind to if you have the context.…

Not only anonymously, they should be published all at once (yes, the risk of duplicate feedback is totally worth it); someone please submit a GitHub feature request ;)

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#324

Post by bitwize »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #199
bitwize wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From What I understand Bellard's code is fairly "dirty". FFmpeg, as I understand it, was hard to modify, maintain, or integrate with. Don't get me wrong, he's a fucking wizard. He's Mozart when the most talented of us can only ever hope to be Salieri. But part of that is, he dashes off brilliant code without much thought to its maintainability, then leaves for the next project.

Yea sorry, I guess I could have picked my "heros" with more care maybe add in a John Carmack ? :) >Don't get me wrong, he's a fucking wizard. He's Mozart when the most talented of us can only ever hope to be Salieri. But part of that is, he dashes off brilliant code without much thought to its maintainability, then leaves for the next project. Absolutely agree's - Well that is "maybe" one unpopular-metric we need to…

That's the thing about Bellard. I don't think he cares really whether his code has an impact or not. And yet it does.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#325

Post by maximus-decimus »

rootlocus wrote: post #99
usrbinbash wrote: post #45

The fact that everyone can come up with his own definition of what "clean" is supposed to mean regarding code, tells us something very important about it: It has no intrinsic, defined meaning in the context of code. Saying code is "clean" is like saying food is "tasty"...its a personal opinion, not a defined term.

And yet we all agree, spoiled food tastes terrible.

But not all food that tastes terrible is spoiled.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#326

Post by kgeist »

yakubin wrote: post #96
onion2k wrote: post #59

The Uncle Bob Martin definition of "clean code" from his book "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" is a set of rules that absolutely are not at odds with one another. 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. There's a decent summary here - https://gist.github.com/wojteklu/73c6914cc446146b…

> 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"…

>the default case is that you want everything public

I'd say that's only true for objects whose purpose is to merely group semi-related data together for copy/transfer/storage, nothing more. If your object has invariants/rules, it's a completely different story.

>legitimate uses of "private" exist, but are rare

So if you have a domain object with certain invariants (and any serious project has plenty of those), who makes sure its invariants are always upheld? If everyone is allowed to put whatever they want inside your object, it's easy to end up with inconsistent/corrupt data. Ideally, you want all the logic which deals with object mutations and their validation to be concentrated in one single place, and force all clients to use it, to avoid copypasting same code every time you mutate an object (which is error-prone). That single place can be the object itself, in the constructor or the setters, with fields made private (or const) to defend against misuse. Of course, you can validate object state in a separate function and treat your objects as just dumb bags of data, but then we aren't talking about OOP anymore (where the argument "private vs. public" actually makes sense).

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#327

Post by hinkley »

skohan wrote: post #305
hinkley wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go really really fast when you don’t give a shit about consequences. Often the worst code comes from prolific people. There’s just so much if it. And if you touch it you will break it at least 1% of the time, so you have to pick your battles when you are trying to keep the ratio under control.

If you write loosely-coupled code, it shouldn't be that easy to break things unless you're careless.

If it were loosely coupled it wouldn’t be an anecdote in this conversation. There is no “I”, there is no “you”. There is only “us”. I can only control Us so much, and I don’t have a time machine.

People who only have green field projects as their context are very frustrating in conversations like this. They make suggestions like, well, don’t fuck up in the first place. I don’t know what your history is but that’s the feeling I’m getting.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#328

Post by hinkley »

skohan wrote: post #312
hinkley wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very self-centered way to think about things. I don’t mean selfish, I mean thinking as a “me” problem instead of an “us” problem. If I have to rewrite a bit of my code then them’s the breaks. But I work on a team, sometimes a big team. I don’t have “a house” I have a construction crew that is building many houses and will go on building them. If they’re doing it wrong then I have not only the problem in fro…

I want to work with people who I trust to rewrite my code. And of course I don't mean that you should check in code which is a mess. But from the time you start a feature to the time you open a PR, you can go through several iterations of messy code before arriving at a solution which is fit to share with your colleagues.

I do too, but I can’t spend my whole life interviewing, and sometimes great teams just run out of money.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#329

Post by redleader9345 »

The quote from this article that really hit home for me, was this:

"Coding is generally a team sport. If you’re hacking away on your own then you can do what you want, but when we’re working with a team then we’ve got to discuss our ideas."

My current job has this quasi-team, where we all work from the same backlog, with very little coordination, collaboration, or communication. Everyone just pulls a ticket and runs with it in whatever direction they desire.

I can't stand it. When I raise the issue with my manager, it's just not registering. The turnover and retention is poor, so there are a bunch of new team members, and few people with tenure (like a single dev). The prevailing attitude is that if you reach out to collaborate with someone on your ticket, you're not only wasting the other person's time, but you yourself are incompetent. Because, why can't you just crush tickets all day every day without bothering anyone?

It's silly.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#330

Post by skohan »

hinkley wrote: post #327
skohan wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you write loosely-coupled code, it shouldn't be that easy to break things unless you're careless.

If it were loosely coupled it wouldn’t be an anecdote in this conversation. There is no “I”, there is no “you”. There is only “us”. I can only control Us so much, and I don’t have a time machine. People who only have green field projects as their context are very frustrating in conversations like this. They make suggestions like, well, don’t fuck up in the first place. I don’t know what your history is but that’s the…

Not that it matters but I've worked on a mix of green-field projects and mature codebases in various domains with teams of various sizes over more than a decade of professional experience.

I could assume you're throwing shade on "prolific programmers" out of some sense of insecurity, but it wouldn't be fair to generalize about strangers on the internet ;)

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