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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

#291

Post by websitescenes »

cm2012 wrote: post #260
websitescenes wrote: post #258

Wow, this post has triggered some emotion from me. I find it incredibly traumatic working with “engineers” that have this point of view. The pain individuals like this inflict on others is real! What they are really saying is that they don’t care about their fellow developers, their productivity nor happiness. This view will lead to “good enough” code that always appears to “work” but fails easily and creates more wo…

I don't see how you can read the article and come away with this opinion. The author's not saying that you shouldn't make quality code, he's saying that no one agrees on the definition of clean so you should use more descriptive language.

Agreed, read more carefully and makes me feel like this comment is misplaced.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#292

Post by nfw2 »

skohan wrote: post #203
gefhfffh wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When can you rebuild at zero cost? I have made similar avoidable mistakes of not thinking it through enough, could have saved me a lot of rewriting, which was pretty expensive

Rewriting is incredibly cheap! And you learn a lot from the failed attempts. Again to the house analogy, if you could just build 3 vestibules to see how they fit with just a little typing, that would be far and away preferable to committing to everything on paper before hand.

Are you the only working on the codebase? It may be easy to rewrite your own codebase, but it's certainly not easy to rewrite someone else's. Especially if they haven't been caring about code quality and/or test coverage.

My definition of "good-quality" code is pretty much exactly "how difficult would this codebase be for a new engineer to understand and modify safely."

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#293

Post by hinkley »

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…

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 front of me but five copies elsewhere. And I can’t fix problems N times faster than they are made. And I can’t always sell them on the better technique, even when there are demonstrable problems with theirs.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#294

Post by hinkley »

nfw2 wrote: post #287
skohan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Usually you can't delete half your codebase and re-build it at zero cost. The cost of developing a codebase is often the primary cost for software companies.

The cost of the knowledge of that code and the techniques that created is spread in five to fifty other brains. That’s the hard part. You keep finding new copies of patterns you’re trying to remove.

In a couple of notable cases, that didn’t stop until I removed the last copy. My theory is that certain people were cutting and pasting code from one of the three surviving copies.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#295

Post by mannykannot »

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…

The development of the relational model of databases is an example where thinking things through led to a radically different and superior solution, going in a very different direction than ad-hoc development had produced, or was ever likely to produce. At the time Codd published his seminal paper, there were no implementations of those ideas.

It is also notoriously difficult to get the design of concurrency primitives correct without thinking things through.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#296

Post by hinkley »

sseagull wrote: post #245
gefhfffh wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When start off with "wrong" higher level design concepts, neither of those is trivial. If you're writing a function implementation without thinking about design, well you might be right.

I sometimes wonder if there is a miscommunication. I’m scratching my head sometimes like “how can rewriting/refactoring an entire 10-20k project take negligible time?” Maybe some people have very small projects compared to what I work on? Or maybe they are talking about the design of a single small component? I inherited a codebase that needed some refactoring because it was written “to just get it shipped”. If compl…

We always talk about time when the elephant in the room is energy. People say we don’t have “time” for that and someone else gets out a calendar and tries to disprove them. Followed by a bunch of backpedaling with other excuses and followed up with foot dragging.

The second elephant in the room is job security. People who write baroque code are hard to fire. Nobody wants to invest energy in understanding their private little Bedlam.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#297

Post by hinkley »

nfw2 wrote: post #292
skohan wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rewriting is incredibly cheap! And you learn a lot from the failed attempts. Again to the house analogy, if you could just build 3 vestibules to see how they fit with just a little typing, that would be far and away preferable to committing to everything on paper before hand.

Are you the only working on the codebase? It may be easy to rewrite your own codebase, but it's certainly not easy to rewrite someone else's. Especially if they haven't been caring about code quality and/or test coverage. My definition of "good-quality" code is pretty much exactly "how difficult would this codebase be for a new engineer to understand and modify safely."

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.

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#298

Post by ravenstine »

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"…

How else is "Uncle" Bob Martin supposed to sell more books and presentations if people actually write code they can understand and are happy with? :D

Re: There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

#300

Post by geodel »

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…

Great points. I guess I was following some of these rules unknowingly. In one of the project I organized code as one business functionality per package which may be unforgivable sin in "enterprise java best practices". With little duplication it makes so much simpler to see that all business rules, logic handling in just one package. The absolute common thing like database connection management etc is in some common place.
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