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It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

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Re: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

#81

Post by crucialfelix »

avg_dev wrote: post #4

Wow this is quite a takedown. For many years I was feeling like I let myself down by not reading the book Clean Code. I now feel like, by accident, I did exactly the right thing. That sample code he quoted is near unreadable to me. I also did enjoy A Philosophy of Software Design; the main thing I took away from it was to avoid unneeded complexity because you want to be able to “spend” your complexity budget for doin…

If you read the book, understand the principals and then disagree with a few of them, you will have learned more than if you never read it at all.

Re: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

#82

Post by ornornor »

d4mi3n wrote: post #64
ornornor wrote: post #48

From my decade writing software professionally and my current job search, I really question the actual demand for clean code. That’s unfortunate because it’s my specialty and what gives me job satisfaction. I love fixing things. I actually enjoy working on a crappy codebase that has made the company money but is now too hard to maintain/extend and needs cleaning. Adding tests, refactoring, extracting functionality to…

I think as professionals many of us like to take pride in our work. A natural way to do that is for code to be "clean". The problem, as I see it, is that this is often a subjective metric and what we take pride in doesn't always align with what delivers tangible value to an organization (a point you alluded to). Clean code can bring tangible value, but big rewrites taken on for that goal can often not. I personally t…

> what is valuable depends a lot on context and the point in life of a particular project+team+organization.

For sure, and I only target companies or teams that are mature, struggle to move forward because code quality grinds things down to a halt, and that express the desire for improvement there.

However, there are very few companies that 1. Even have the awareness to realize this is where they’re at, and 2. Actually mean it. I’ve been passed over many times in favour of someone else who ships code quickly and cheaply by lowering quality. Every place I’ve ever worked at, quality is the least concern in relation to the others.

Now for a startup that has limited runway and has to find product market fit for example then it’s totally different. Focus rightly is on shipping stuff at the expense of quality because survival is on the line. In a few years, once this company has made it, they’ll look for someone to clean their codebase up.

My broader question though is whether I should keep branding myself as a “code cleaner”. Despite a (minority) of companies advertising positions for that skill, my experience has been that the vast majority simply don’t care. And those that do, don’t actually care all that much. It’s a struggle though because I get no satisfaction from shipping low quality code and eventually end up quitting out of boredom or frustration. I’m now at a point where I’m considering doing something entirely different from programming because I can’t derive any job satisfaction from writing low quality code and the resulting constant firefighting that results from it.

Re: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

#83

Post by tommica »

dietrichepp wrote: post #53

My experience is that I run into a lot of relatively junior programmers who are concerned about clean code. Is my code clean? How do I organize my code? How do I make it clean? Should we clean up this code? I almost never want to use the word “clean” when I’m talking about code. These days, when someone asks me to review code, and they start talking about “clean” code, I shift the discussion to two points—code should…

Clarity! That's my goal for my code: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6sNmJtoKDCo

Re: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

#84

Post by ornornor »

emodendroket wrote: post #61
ornornor wrote: post #48

From my decade writing software professionally and my current job search, I really question the actual demand for clean code. That’s unfortunate because it’s my specialty and what gives me job satisfaction. I love fixing things. I actually enjoy working on a crappy codebase that has made the company money but is now too hard to maintain/extend and needs cleaning. Adding tests, refactoring, extracting functionality to…

Of course the people signing the checks don't care about that directly, but it's something you can do as you add functionality.

That’s my understanding as well, quality for the sake of it isn’t appealing.

But it is known that a quality foundation enables everything in the business, reduces waste, churn, and increases profits.

Yet when it comes down to actually doing it, nobody cares. Fast and cheap always wins over quality.

That’s not necessarily a problem overall, but it is for me because I derive no satisfaction from shipping low quality code and the constant firefighting that results.

This is a struggle because it’s the vast majority of the demand for software, which makes me want to quit the industry altogether even though I love programming and improving “legacy” codebase. But there seem to be no actual demand for this skill despite the appearances.

Re: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

#85

Post by dietrichepp »

cush wrote: post #77
dietrichepp wrote: post #53

My experience is that I run into a lot of relatively junior programmers who are concerned about clean code. Is my code clean? How do I organize my code? How do I make it clean? Should we clean up this code? I almost never want to use the word “clean” when I’m talking about code. These days, when someone asks me to review code, and they start talking about “clean” code, I shift the discussion to two points—code should…

It can definitely be confusing to hear "clean" when communicating in a professional setting. That said, in the book he covers correctness and understandability in nearly every paragraph. It's all the book is about really. It's called "clean" because it's concise and a catchy book title.

If you say the book “covers correctness and understandability in nearly every paragraph” then I’m convinced we must be talking about different books.

For example, the book presents a rule for class names:

> Classes and objects should have noun or noun phrase names like Customer, WikiPage, Account, and AddressParser. Avoid words like Manager, Processor, Data, or Info in the name of a class. A class name should not be a verb.

What a proclamation! We could connect this to correctness and understandability. But the book does not. You could say that it is harder to understand a class named “SomethingManager” because “manager” is vague, and more specific words are usually preferred. Instead, the book presents a rule, without explanation or example. Kind of like the Strunk & White book on style, and if you like Strunk & White, then we disagree on at least two books.

That’s my general complaint about the book. Too many proclamations, too much doctrine, not enough explanation or foundation.

Re: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

#86

Post by ornornor »

noisy_boy wrote: post #62
ornornor wrote: post #48

From my decade writing software professionally and my current job search, I really question the actual demand for clean code. That’s unfortunate because it’s my specialty and what gives me job satisfaction. I love fixing things. I actually enjoy working on a crappy codebase that has made the company money but is now too hard to maintain/extend and needs cleaning. Adding tests, refactoring, extracting functionality to…

> They all say they do of course, while actually being afraid of doing this because it takes more time and money. That is my experience too with most places - they say that they support clean, well tested and maintainable code and then turn around and ask things to be delivered in unreasonable time resulting in quick and dirty code. > I also suspect that not focusing on clean code is a strategy many managers have bec…

So… how do you deal with this on a personal level? How do you retain any shred of sanity or enjoyment from your work?

I can’t stand self inflicted toil and the stress from constant firefighting which is invariably the result of these short term policies. It makes me want to quit programming altogether and work in something totally unrelated even though I love programming. Just not the way employers want it.

Re: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

#87

Post by blt »

I get the impression that Uncle Bob Martin worked on CRUD-type projects with very few interesting design decisions to be made about what the software should do computationally. In these projects, the programmer's mind wanders. It latches onto the endless design decisions one can dream up about how the source code should be organized.

It's hard to imagine anyone going this far down the rabbit hole of strange code organization when they are facing serious challenges like real-time demands, high concurrency, reliability, complex algorithms, big data, embedded systems, etc.

Re: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

#88

Post by emodendroket »

ornornor wrote: post #84
emodendroket wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the people signing the checks don't care about that directly, but it's something you can do as you add functionality.

That’s my understanding as well, quality for the sake of it isn’t appealing. But it is known that a quality foundation enables everything in the business, reduces waste, churn, and increases profits. Yet when it comes down to actually doing it, nobody cares. Fast and cheap always wins over quality. That’s not necessarily a problem overall, but it is for me because I derive no satisfaction from shipping low quality co…

Think of it this way. Imagine you hire an electrician to do some task. If while he's there he cleans up some stuff around where he was working, that's welcome. If he starts rewiring your whole house for no particular reason, even though everything was working fine, and billing you by the hour, you might not be pleased.

Re: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

#89

Post by admo1 »

Am I the only one who thinks it's a great book and that it should still be among the top books to be recommended ? Maybe not the first one but easily in the top 10.

Each time I see the same discussion on HN about this book, I'm always wondering why I see so many people going in either direction : not following the advice of the book at all, or following it too religiously.

For me, the philosophy of the books was always about "having a set of guidance on how to improve your code, IF YOU NEED IT", and never about a strict set of rules that were mandatory to follow in order to have "clean code".

The fact that the book gives strong statements about what clean code is, such as "a function should be only one line" was always an exaggeration for me, albeit a useful one to actually makes the reader think more deeply about its function length, but never about forcing you to split your 1000 lines functions into 100 functions of 10 lines, if you don't need it.

Re: It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)

#90

Post by codeape »

Joel Spolsky's (harsh) comments on SOLID, from a 2009 episode of the Stack Overflow podcast (https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/01/22/podcast-38/ https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?pg=pgWiki&comm...):

"And, when I was listening to them, they all sounded to me like, to me, extremely bureaucratic programming that came from the mind of somebody that has not written a lot of code, frankly."

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