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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

#371

Post by hogrider »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #167
karatinversion wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hide internal structure (that "private" is the default in C++, Java and Rust just adds to boilerplate; the default case is that you want everything public (unless you like writing trivial getters and setters just for the fun of it); legitimate uses of "private" exist, but are rare) This is such a strange POV to me. There are cases where your classes are just data records, but any object with logic surely wants to r…

This is where Python's "consenting adults" idea comes in. Why the hell should someone change a vector "mid-flight" - that is a huge code smell and should be dealt with in the review / design / discussion / pub. But there are reasons and rationales to "lockdown" the code (beyond not trusting fellow devs!) and at that point I suggest that any mutable state language cannot be properly locked down - so use a functional l…

In most situations, no you can not trust fellow devs to do the right thing and if you push for those reviews then you're the asshole and lose the office politics game. So yeah, I'd rather guardrail people into good behavior.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#372

Post by marcos100 »

skohan wrote: post #247
marcos100 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm just having trouble understanding what you're talking about. Like what would be a concrete example of how a poor up-front design decision would paint you into an unrecoverable corner?

If you have infinite time to recover, there is no problem, but you could also design something perfect using that infinite time.

A bit of thinking about design and architecture can save you a lot of time. Start with the wrong data structures and maybe you'll have to patch a lot of thing or just redesign everything from scratch.

Be an architecture astronaut and you may never release whatever you're suppose to develop.

It's all about trade-offs.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#373

Post by valenterry »

robertlagrant wrote: post #369
valenterry wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we disagree. It's just that a lambda doesn't change this. If the lambda itself also contains a branch, then yeah, you should probably test the outer function with at least 2 inputs.

I agree, except I think that a lamdba is an arbitrary line to draw for that as well. Why not stop at the main function and give it a load of inputs? A five line lamdba looks a lot like a named function, just harder to test, reuse, and debug in a stack trace.

I was basing my comment on this:

> 20 short functions definitely sound as though they should be explicit.

And you are right that it's pretty arbitrary when/if a lambda should specifically be tested or not. But the number of lambdas in a project isn't really a good factor to make that decision - it's individual for each function that contains a lambda.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#374

Post by he0001 »

I loathe the “clean code” discussions. It’s highly subjective and unmeasurable. I want along and wrote some code which was highly test driven, because why not, and at code review this guy said that it wasn’t readable, eg clean enough, and not testable. I explained that the code was derived with TDD and he couldn’t believe it. Another colleague saw it and agreed with me. But the point here is that all of these reviews and clean code debates are just tiresome and silly.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#375

Post by hinkley »

Mawr wrote: post #361
sseagull wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who have been coding for a while learn not to repeat their mistakes. Their code contains good-ish abstractions and other “clean code” features because they intuitively know what they are doing. The code they just wrote to get something done & shipped is probably somewhat “clean” by most standards. But communicating those ideas to less experienced developers is where the problem comes in and all the prescriptiv…

Almost right ;) Novices need simple rules to follow. The world of a novice is filled with uncertainty, they have nearly zero intuition as to what's good or bad, so simple rules that get them 80% there are essential. Otherwise they'd get lost in the complexity. However, with time, as they gather experience, learn, and mature, they should be able to figure out the reasoning behind the rules they were once given. That t…

Same with “premature optimization”. Many things can be fixed later. Some can’t or won’t, and those typically get ignored or relabeled as “good design” when it is still ultimately minmaxing cpu time versus developer brain cells.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#376

Post by hinkley »

gilbetron wrote: post #271
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…

I've got about a decade more of coding over you and I can confirm the same. The only time you see "clean code" is trivial examples. Get a project that needs to do something complex, and suddenly it becomes not so clean. That's because the real world is messy and complex and solutions are almost always the same. I love your priority list, although I'm scratching my head over the order - not that it is wrong, but I don…

What I see is that the code bases that don’t get cleaner over time either go away, or calcify and the maintainers spend most of their energy on talking people out of changing anything.

I’ve worked on teams where a competitor could add features faster than us and eventually they pulled ahead and took customers. I’ve been on the other team too. Early lead matters if you planning a quick sale and to run with the money. But if you miss then someone will eat your lunch. If you learn to write less brittle code you can recover.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#377

Post by hinkley »

ahmaman wrote: post #165
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…

> It would be cool if code-reviews were done "anonymously" Sometimes during code-reviews I find myself wanting to leave 100+ comments. Instead I settle for the few major ones and leave behind most of the minor stuff. I don't want to be perceived as someone who is difficult to work with, so try to pick my battles wisely. Wonder if anonymous code-review that helps with that.

Current team has very low code review participation, and I have a few fights I’m putting most of my energy into so I have to let other things go.

But when I was in your shoes, I figured out that some other people would make the same comments I would if they saw them first. The simplest thing to do was to wait or poke them to review the code, then mop up anything they missed. Or I could gamble that they would eventually review it and leave empty space for them to fill.

I think it’s not unlike what the smart kids learn in school: you might know the answer before the question is even out of the teacher’s mouth, but give everybody else in the class a chance before you put your hand up. What’s important is that everyone learn the answer, (and to keep the flow of the lesson, that the question gets answered) not that the answer comes from you.

You can also bury the lede by saying too much. If you complain about eight things how are they to know that #3 is the most problematic?

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#378

Post by hinkley »

matwood wrote: post #224
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.

I think I’ve learned more about what makes good code by watching people trying to use code than from anything else. I have been doing this since college, when people would hear me helping my roommate finish an assignment so we could go home, and ask more questions. Some people are just out of their element. Some tools are just garbage even though they were written by clever people. Some tools are just garbage because they were written by clever people.

At least a third of the time if a promising junior doesn’t “get it” it’s because there’s nothing to “get”. The code I/we wrote doesn’t explain itself well, misses a useful behavior that would make it more obvious how to use it, or drastically simplify a feature. These people, particularly these situations, teach me more than I teach them.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#379

Post by hinkley »

stavros wrote: post #144
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…

Does e.g. Fabrice Bellard code "correctly"? Getting shit done isn't the same as "coding correctly" (sometimes it's very close to the opposite).

When I was young I wrote code so I could understand it. Everyone goes faster when the code looks like how they expect it to look. Some of these 10x people are really good, others have mental models that are alien, and so nobody else can touch their stuff because none of it makes a lick of sense to anybody else. These are 3x devs that make everyone else .3x devs.

Writing code for me made me indispensable, then it made me a bottleneck with a stream of uncomfortable distractions in the form of people queuing up for me to answer questions or fix bugs or implement features. It was exhausting, but I was happy enough. That is, until there was a cooler project I wasn’t allowed to transfer to because I was indispensable.

Figure out how to write code so other people can read it. Figure out how to write code so other people can modify it. It looks a bit like clean code, but sometimes isn’t. Occasionally it can be quite different.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#380

Post by MaxBarraclough »

rootlocus wrote: post #108
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"…

> One assert per test Was meant to make a failed test instantly communicate what's wrong with the unit under test. As frameworks evolve and our practices around them change, it's absolutely fine to come up with new rules. All of uncle Bobs rules come with pages of explanations of what problems they solve. If you don't have those problems, you may not need those solutions. The book is more about the spirit of the law…

> > One assert per test

> Was meant to make a failed test instantly communicate what's wrong with the unit under test. As frameworks evolve and our practices around them change, it's absolutely fine to come up with new rules.

To put a finer point on that then, you're saying the rule is obsolete if your test framework allows assert statements to accept message strings?

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