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 versed in C,C++,PHP,Go,TypeScript and to a lesser degree Java and a few bits and bobs in between F#,Haskell,LISP...

The above is not to brag (not that it's brag worthy after 25 years you bound to pick up a few tools) just to put it in perspective.

On Code quality: I've noticed it's easy to agree/identify the "extreme cases" the VERY VERY BAD CODING and the very very GOOD CODING. But most of the coders and codebases falls somewhere in between where the code-quality-water quickly gets murky.

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.

The best thus far advise I've seen on code-quality guidelines is from a comment on HN:

>I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11042400

Sure I might just be a dumb idiot or completely not gifted in the "art or science" of coding. :)

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/design pattern which will solve the problem in the most elegant or clever way

Besides that, I'm a huge fan of disposable code. In my experience 99% of the time, the best approach is to just dive into the problem and try to solve the problem in the most pragmatic way. Maybe that's hard-coding a lot of things. Maybe that's having a small amount of repetition here and there. Maybe it's writing one long function with 1000 lines.

After that it's all about continuous improvement. You spend your time solving the problem, and when your code becomes hard to work on, you spend time improving your code to make it easier to work on by cleaning things up, and adding sensible abstractions which solve the problems you actually have.

In my experience, over time this approach leaves you with a very ergonomic and easy to understand codebase.

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 figured this fundamental design flaw the night before we had to hand the assignment in and there was no way I could rewrite everything from scratch. I had to push through and put lipstick on this pig as best I could.

In the end, I had spent way more time working on this project than my friends who had spent time upfront designing their programs instead of just jumping in.

This has taught me the lesson to always first try and think things through and come up with some kind of initial design, instead of just jumping in and writing code blindly. Yes you can always refactor, but some early design mistakes can cost you a lot of time, and perhaps make refactoring unfeasible compared to a complete rewrite.

As they say "measure twice, cut once".

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.

If you find yourself working on a "monstrosity" maybe you haven't seen the signs soon enough that you need to take a step back and refactor. But in my experience, at least starting on the problem with a POC gives you so much more high quality information that even if you have to scrap and re-write part way in, you're going to reach such a better result than if you try to map the whole thing out first without actually having tried to solve the problem.

I have made similar avoidable mistakes of not thinking it through enough, could have saved me a lot of rewriting, which was pretty expensive

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.

Example:

Dendrite[0] was going to be a Rewrite of Synapse (which was a prototype which ended up going into production). The rewrite started more than 5 years ago, had lots of development breaks and it still is nowhere complete or close to replace a existing Synapse instance (which even today is ... Well ... suboptimal software).

The current plans are to support and use both servers long term, because Synapse is already too widespread.

I wouldn't call that cheap.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite

Isn't your example proof of the benefit of pragmatic coding? Synapse is actually serving users right now. Dendrite sounds like a "better design" which is stuck in purgatory.

https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta

You don't see all the perfectly designed codebases that never went anywhere.

We only talk about legacy code because it's the one that pays the bills.

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."

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.

For everyone else this is tautological. Good code can continue to be good code.

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.

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 ;)

I just punch up at condescending people. Every discipline has a bunch of armchair people who don’t understand the problem who think “get more exercise” is the response to depressed people or people with chronic fatigue, “eat fewer calories” is the answer to weight issues or diabetes, or “write it right the first time” is a useful response to people trying to solve real world problems.

Kindly let the grownups talk and keep your flash card answers to yourself.

Well one of us is certainly being condescending ;)

And did you really answer twice to the same comment? My goodness I must have really struck a nerve.

Code has a lot of really great properties which make it easy to modify in provably safe ways if you know what you're doing.

Which isn't to say that rewriting can't be cheap, but some intentional design (or at least diligent maintenance and refactoring) must have gone into the system to support that style of development. At which point you're back to targeting "quality," even if it's no longer a focus of on the smaller scale.

If the amount of time that it takes to rewrite something is trivial (a week or less) then you aren't working on something all that big/complicated.

If you're writing a function implementation without thinking about design, well you might be right.

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 completely fell apart with more users and has taken me a year to get it where it needs to be.

As you need to add functionality, you can opportunistically find ways to improve the codebase toward a better/more maintainable structure.

I have several large codebases I work on which probably get totally rewritten every 18 months or 2 years, however incrementally.

If you have a working project and you think you need to throw it all out and start from scratch probably it's worth a second thought.

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.

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

I have no idea why there is a large (or at least vocal) community of developers whose dogma seems to be that thinking things through is a waste of time (though maybe it is just an overreaction to the equally dogmatic clean coders and similar prescriptivists.)

My point is more that coding itself is an excellent tool for probing for solutions. In many cases I think "software design" is over valued, and time spent prototyping is often more valuable than time spent thinking though the problem if you want to arrive at a high quality answer.

The hard part is done, but basically we had to switch the engine while the car was running so to speak. In order to switch this out you need to start writing the correct data shape, then switch everything over to reading that shape. When people work strict 9 to 5s this will take you forever especially when managing a large amount of volume, which requires you to be extremely risk-averse and slow.

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.

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.

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.

I look forward to that day when atoms are commanded like bits!

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

There is no incrementel rewrite between different stack/heap handling as those are an absolutely central parts of the design, which are pretty much impossible to try to encapsulate, as opposed to the 34th API endpoint. So what it means is that certain domains have much higher essential complexity and at that point the average encapsulation given by OOP/language tools are not sufficient to contain these parts, complexity will triumph and the whole program has to be viewed as one unified whole. Concurrent applications are a similar can of worms.

I have applied incremental design to concurrent applications and a compiler + stack VM project that runs in embedded environments. You don't go in blind. You do need domain experience and broad strokes knowledge of the conventions. You make some major architectural decisions up front but these don't involve much planning or design. Contrary to your point about CRUD apps, API design is harder to achieve incrementally since it is an interface and requires cross-team (sometimes cross-organizational) iteration. It's still possible, but your organization needs to be equipped for incremental/agile work.

But it's interesting you mentioned compilers - I'm in the process of writing one, and I very much used an incremental approach.

The first pass I essentially wrote a parser and a component which walked the AST and produced output. At a certain point it was clear that local knowledge of the AST wasn't sufficient to capture non-local details about the program which were required to produce the correct output. I got away for a short time with dirty tricks, but eventually transitioned to a new design: I kept the lexer and parser, and implemented a data driven IR in the style of an ECS system to be built up before emitting output.

So I threw out the initial output component, but I learned a ton by starting with an end-to-end compiler, however incomplete. If I hadn't taken that step, and tried first to plan the perfect IR on paper, I am certain I would have reached an inferior result.

edit: and even the IR and compiler middleware is loosely coupled. The IR is essentially a set of flat data tables, each of which is built independently by walking the AST. And the compiler is implemented in a series of independent passes: i.e. one pass to build the IR, one pass to derive type information etc. so it's very much grown into a series of independent components, each of which could be independently rewritten without affecting the others very much.

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.

100% One of my favorite techniques is "Super Pseudo Code" ! Why SUPER ?

Lol cause the "pseudo code" I write can barley be called "code at all" - It is usually just a text-file with a bunch of loosey-goosey-function-calls and parameters.

You know just to get a "feel" for how different entities(classes,struct,tables or libs - pick your poison) will interact and what might be needed. We not talking any UML-Diagrams here - really just text-files and functions/entities

This also works super-well for any multi-step-processes.

The more code your design decision will affect, the more up-front planning it deserves.

You can't loosely couple around questions like these most of the time, at last not without excessive abstraction.

For "how do I structure this reasonably isolated 0-1kLOC component", I agree, easy to fix later if needed.

And like for example if you want to change web frameworks, that's something you can do incrementally. If you're talking about front-end, just find a way to encapsulate your old code behind a clean interface and start implementing new components in the new framework. If you're talking about back-end, then you can just implement new endpoints in a new language if you want even, and gradually migrate things over when you have to modify them.

and also the reuse of the term architecture.. don't put beams at random and see if it works, plan in advance and calculate. They probably had these realizations thousands of years ago, it's a generic economy principle.

I forgot what the saying is but solution unfold themselves when you thought about the problem long enough.

Oh and lastly, Grothendieck said he wasn't in the business of solving problems, but expressing them.

I sort of agree with this, but not quite. I care about code quality, but not code aesthetics. Aesthetics was really important to me when I was younger and more inexperienced. I wanted my code to be pretty, and wouldn't be happy until I found an algorithm or abstraction that met my definitions of pretty code. I would polish it until it was shiny. I would even align my variable names to be pleasing to the eye.

20 years later, I know there are things that will just never quite look neat. FizzBuzz is a pretty accessible example of this phenomenon, but most non-trivial algorithms have that to some extent.

> Besides that, I'm a huge fan of disposable code. In my experience 99% of the time, the best approach is to just dive into the problem and try to solve the problem in the most pragmatic way. Maybe that's hard-coding a lot of things. Maybe that's having a small amount of repetition here and there. Maybe it's writing one long function with 1000 lines.

> After that it's all about continuous improvement. You spend your time solving the problem, and when your code becomes hard to work on, you spend time improving your code to make it easier to work on by cleaning things up, and adding sensible abstractions which solve the problems you actually have.

I too am firmly in the camp of write code first, refactor into a maintainable solution when it works. Maybe it's tacit experience refactoring messy code, sort of knowing in the back of your head how it will shape up when refactored.

But communicating those ideas to less experienced developers is where the problem comes in and all the prescriptive dogma arises.

But this happens in all fields. How many times do experts give some advice they don’t always follow themselves? Experts understand when and how to break the rules, and that comes with experience.

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 then will allow them to make decisions on whether the rule is appropriate for the given context or not.

Of course, getting to that point requires continuous improvement, which is why many, if not most, programmers don't get there.

Example: "Never use `goto` in C." - great advice for a beginner, they'd just make their code into spaghetti. However, a seasoned coder knows that `goto` is only a problem when used to jump to arbitrary points in the code, so using it to reduce duplicated error handling is perfectly fine.

I think a lot of it is just lack of context. A lot of "best practice" advice is valuable in certain cases but it gets over-applied, and people end up wasting a lot of time on things which don't matter.

My approach is slightly different.

I think for a while and then start on the path that gets me to what I think is a common case. If the whole seems more complicated than reasonable, I back out the part that seems to be troublesome.

Eventually, I get one case "working". That case might not be complete, but it does something.

I then work on an adjacent case, using the same "back out the troublesome" process, going into a bit more detail (or perhaps deciding that some detail on the first case was wrong).

I repeat "work on adjacent cases" until most/all cases are handled. As I do more cases, I use opportunities to reduce the cognitive footprint.

Yea I understand 100% where you coming from ! I also these days try to focus more on "just getting it done/shipped". Lol I even went so far as to have my own little PHP-MicroFramework called "JGID" which means "Just-Get-It-Done" to remind me at EVERY LEVEL even code that is PERFECT but not shipped is not as good as medicore-core that is shipped ! YMMV

>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 like this approach - instead of asking what is "Good Code" You asking, "How has my code improve in 10 years" a subtle change but I there is a lot of value in there.

This type of introspection-question reminds me of the very very common life-purpose question:

a) What will you do if you have a million dollars ? Sure good question... But I always found the better version of this is:

b)What will you do if you KNOW you won't fail ?

To be honest I think it might have originated from Tim Ferris. You like or dislike him, but what I love about him is his great ability to ask interesting questions.

>- I go for abstractions later, only when I need them, rather than trying to think of the perfect abstraction/design pattern which will solve the problem in the most elegant or clever way

Yup I've noticed this as well. I remember my very first paid coding job. Writing a roulette-wheel-number-reader. And I was so proud to have like a OOP-Hierachy of 3 levels and implementing AbstractFactories for multiple reader-types etc :D Only the "other cases/readers" never happen :)

>..After that it's all about continuous improvement..

Yes - I think I've also seen a similar effect, which is "better code" is a function of repeated-iteration of some process. It's like how woman like men that have a plan. Doesn't even have to be a good plan, just have a damn plan :D

It's funny, but those points you are describing are measures of code quality to me. The less interdependencies the higher I value the code, same for abstractions, most of the time it is the simpler the better. Except in those cases where they are explicitly required.

there's a lot of artistry, poetry, idealism in programming, but as a daily money making activity it just doesn't cut it. You have to reach goals as easily as possible (dry,yagni) fast without painting yourself in corners as much as you can (low coupling, min interdependencies). Finding the right variability points.

it's something school don't do well (saying this humbly) yet crucial

ps: I disagree with the article title. k&r, mccarthy's lisp, prolog, and many other have very clean general and beautiful code.

I only "lead" one project (a minuscule thing by all means) and it was the first time I was responsible, and instead of burning out in rabbitholes, I discovered the bliss of being sharp cause I had near no time to allocate to anything. Suddenly only the minimum amount of change was important and you stop caring for so many parameters. It leads to a saner sense of skills and progress.

You also start to understand systemic ideas better, every patch or change will have your brain think "is this gonna rot fast ? or will it be nicely decoupled from the rest and more pros than cons in the future?". No effort is wasted, every step improves the system. It feels very good, and makes you want to do more of that. Unlike 99% of side projects where you spend days on DESIGN.md or TODO or watching conferences about <trick>

There are many categories of code problem that you don’t have to get right the first time. Some things can grow organically. But there are combinations that can be extremely resistant to change.

In particular, shared state is both state and coupling. Global shared state is a fucking nightmare, and almost made me quit my current job a couple months in.

I thought I could fix it, but I underestimated the number of hands in the code, and the longevity of the alliances I could make to get it done. The thing with a hideous mess is that the people who don’t mind it stick around, and they probably made it in the first place. Mostly what’s kept me here is the pandemic, and he fact that a lot of my energy is now in a hobby, not invested in my job. The tiebreaker was that some self-aware wolves have found slightly better code patterns and I have been exploiting that all I can. Write more like that, delete code like this ASAP. We have spent much of the last 18 months working on things I identified in my first six weeks. Not always in the most healthy way, but at least some people are looking at it.

It worries me that with the leetcode fad in vogue people will pay even less attention to the things which actually matter in real software development.

> >I try to optimize my code around reducing state, coupling, complexity and code, in that order. I'm willing to add increased coupling if it makes my code more stateless. I'm willing to make it more complex if it reduces coupling. And I'm willing to duplicate code if it makes the code less complex. Only if it doesn't increase state, coupling or complexity do I dedup code.

That's beautiful advice. Something similar that I heard was "flow of data > dependencies > interfaces", in terms of what to worry about. Interesting how they're so similar but from different sources.

But yeah, I second your experiences. Focusing on this stuff, like in code reviews for example, ends up making all other downstream concerns so much easier.

Maybe that is clue they/we are on the right track ? Coming to the similar conclusion from different angles ? :)

I love your priority list, although I'm scratching my head over the order - not that it is wrong, but I don't know if it is exactly what I would do. There are cases where I will take more state to be (a lot) less complex, for instance. Big surprise that even that priority list is a bit messy ;)

I think the most damning thing about Clean Code is that the author has barely written any software for decades. I mean, I like the guy well enough, and he has some ok stuff to say, but he is far from someone people should listen to like a messiah. Go listen to Carmack or watch Jonathan Blow's code stuff. Far more interesting things there.

Absolutely ! :)

>Go listen to Carmack or watch Jonathan Blow's code stuff. Far more interesting things there.

Oh ja ! I definitely should have added Carmack to that list !!

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.

Could you please give the links?

I recommend the Game Engine one and the Compiler one. Note, these are not high level fluff talks like Uncle Bob gives, but in-depth, really deep thoughts and watching him make complex decisions while he is actually coding.

Carmack has a bunch of talks, here's a starter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCBCk4xVa0

Again, he has produced immense amount of software, from Doom to Quake to rocket control tech to Oculus Rift VR devices.

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 whose the author of the code just by reading it.

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.

I've found this to be true in change control as well as any meeting involving people who feel they are compelled to "contribute" even if they don't have anything of value. You don't want to seem like the person who's just attending the meeting and slacking off, so if you're expected to contribute and you can't find any useful critiques, you just pick nits.

> 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, any seasoned def can quickly pick-up who wrote it.

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.

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.

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?

An anonymous code review might only be to make sure everything technically works (as securely as possible).

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.

I would want this to exist within an ide where you could highlight code, submit for review and wait. And if you want to review you can explore pieces of code to review filtered by language within the ide.

I'm 42 and have been coding since 14, so I feel I can also chime in :).

I don't think anyone can really "code correctly". Sometimes, the code just falls into place, and you end up with something simple and clean.

Other times, you're struggling, and your gut feelings tells you it doesn't feel right. But your feature needs to be finished, so you mark it as "good enough".

Sometimes when you need to apply changes to some old code, it fits in nicely. That means your original code was pretty spot on. Oh what a wonderful feeling.

Other times, your old code was messy to start with, and this new thing means you have to rewrite a big part of it.

Like I said, coding is party art, where you need to balance a lot of opposing forces.

There are two types of design methods: those that help you to generate a solution to the problem and those that only help you to optimize a solution, in some dimension, once you have one. Clean Code guidelines clearly belong to the latter.

When you first write code you should not think of Clean Code. It will distract you from solving the problem at hand, while not providing any help in solving it. Only after you have a correct working solution you should consider Clean Code and other optimization guidelines. (Code Complete is much better IMO.)

Knowing when often pays better than knowing how.

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.

Maybe THAT is the metric to focus on. The value of the code versus the quality ? I honestly don't know the answer ?

But I know how much of my "time and energy (as you get older you released the limiting step is your cognitive-energy not so much your actual wallclock-time) " I spent on "trying" todo code correctly which many times it means, the code doesn't get done and I end up frustrated by not shipping anything.

Working for a boss, the above used to upset me a bit. Now working for myself this REALLY upsets me and my 'income' :)

In these cases, I would DEF liked to have "Fabrice" getting shit-done-coding ability ? Again just my humble opinion :)

Maybe coding is like a marriage... a) "You can be right or you can be happy :)"

Squinting hard enough: b) "You can do things correctly or you can ship code in time that makes a difference ?"

I guess the "better" you are the closer the extremes are from "b". i.e IF you are the theoretical-best-coder-that-ever-lived there is should be no "distance/friction" between "coding correctly AND shipping on time code that has an impact" ??

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.

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.

>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 consider as well ? - How much brilliant code can you ship that has a big impact ? I could spent 1 year to "correctly-code some system" but if no one cares or uses it.. does the code or the "better quality" even matter ?? #BigPictureKindOfWay ?

To be clear, I have no idea what is the correct answer here :)

In my opinion there's nothing wrong with calling code clean, we don't have to analyze every line of code we write. There's just too many things to consider and viewpoints to take, we'd be trapped in analysis paralysis forever, as you can continue it to no end. There's never a point where the analysis will be "done". You just have to be able to recognize when the analysis reaches a point of diminishing returns, and when moving on is the better option. Sometimes just calling it "clean" is enough.

My view is that while there is definitely a subjective aspect to quality—whether in code or in writing—a larger portion is objective, just hard to formalize or quantify. Just because we can't measure something directly or because we can't all agree about it in every instance doesn't mean it's subjective. There are a lot of things we can't know exactly but that are still objective, so why not writing or code quality as well?

Like music and other forms of art, different styles appeal differently to different audiences. Many people find the language that 8 year olds write in to be terrible, and some people find it endearing and honest and meaningful. Software is no different in my opinion

Audience always matters

There are different writing styles (and so guide styles associated) for different objectives. Eg, journalism, with a pyramid model designed and refined to ease the process of assimilating information which is different from the playscript style model designed to give general instructions on how to flesh out and enact events.

Both these styles (I intentionally chose for their more obvious rules and usage) have different hard-and-fast rules and applying one instead of the other wouldn't work.

Now, there will be a subjective quality but there are also objective qualities to writings produced with these styles (structure, count of words, choice of wording for description, timeline of events reported, etc.).

Now, of course regarding novels, storytelling, the newyorker, writings that are intended to be read, alone, to tell a story, to convey more than facts and the most objective description of reality yada yada.

And then there are technical manuals. I think code is a technical manual for two kind of audiences: humans and computers, so compromises are made and rules for clarity and brevity can be layout.

Hmmmmmm not sure about that. AFAIK anything that we either can't measure objectively, or don't yet know how to measure objectively, is a subjective measurement, even if that measurement is subject to an objective apparatus (observer effect experiments; the measurement is subject to the circumstances of measurement)

Totally open to being wrong and you being right tho. Any examples come to mind for you?

Of course books get 1 major release. So while ability to maintain and change is much more important in software, that is by far not the only factor for clean-ness, and I'd say hardly the most important.

I agree with you there - but this makes it even more bizarre that there are now tools (e.g. SonarQube) trying to automate this analysis. Of course, linters are a undeniably useful, but stuffing arbitrary rules into a tool which then gives grades to your code based on a strict interpretation of those rules is a bridge too far. I mean, can you really take software that uses terms like "blocker code smell" seriously?!

If that's what it is then I think such tools are "a good servant but a bad master". It does not replace manual analysis, but can be used well to reduce costs of removing common code smells. It still requires a human to work as a judge.

- the code complies with coding conventions in force

- it is correct

- it is not inefficient

I would really love coworkers stick to these three criteria during reviews.

There's a decent summary here - https://gist.github.com/wojteklu/73c6914cc446146b8b533c0988c...

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" 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)

- One assert per test (I guess I need to throw my property-based tests out the window)

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 restrict access to its state so it can maintain invariants? E.g. the simplest classes I can think of, like a vector that consists of a pointer to a buffer, a length and a capacity, wouldn't want to provide a setter for the buffer, or allow callers to set it to a random value?

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 language where its easier to reason about.

Usually (IMO) private classes etc are just trying to make it easier to reason about state changes - when its probably best to dump the whole mess.

It makes almost no sense to have all private class fields and methods. The only thing I can think of is fat handles with friend classes or functions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B_classes

Maybe it's something you could miss if you're coming from a strong C background and still thinking of C++ as C-with-classes, but otherwise it's something any serious user of the language would pick up.

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 than the letter.

I've read thousands of tests with multiple asserts that were perfectly plain about what was being tested and in many cases the logical sequence made it easier to understand.

Breaking them into separate tests with one assert would simply have meant a shit ton more code to read.

Uncle Bob's "rules" often come with mile long caveats that he seems to be blissfully unaware of. I think I get why he said it - overloaded tests are a thing - but he fucked up trying to turn his observation into a rule.

> 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?

Any time a class has invariants to maintain, you probably need private. That could be infrequent in your experience, but overall, invariants are a cornerstone of abstractions.

I think you forgot one of the most devastating points in Clean Code, namely short functions and DRY (when overdoing it). It leads to the same problem "jumping through 50 files".

My favorite subversive action to write clean code is using jumps. There is no end to how convoluted code people write to avoid the oh so harmful leap.

I feel like much of the need for short functions comes from nesting ifs moving to code more and more to the right. That is easily solved by jumps or early returns. Early returns can lead to too many functions if not doing with modesty, though.

EDIT: Dogmas taking the developer out of his comfort zone is probably the main culprit. Any advice is good, as long as you don't follow it.

"One assert per test" -> just test one "concept" per test, not literarily 1 assert statement per test. IE :

  assert(loc.x == 10.3)
  assert(loc.y == 10.4)
  assert(loc.z == 10.5)

In any case, "concept" being such a loosely defined thing would render the rule a bit pointless.

There is something deeper behind this rule but think he fucked up articulating what it was.

Even if you use many files and only put a tiny amount of logic in each of them, you still need to have an understanding of the overall system and how things work together, and scattering things in more places, each with multiple wrappings, just makes that even harder.

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).

I do not deny the usefulness of ADTs (which is what "private" is all about). I question whether it's the right default. My experience tells me it isn't. Whether you call my style of programming "OOP", is irrelevant to me. This term, after decades of evolution, doesn't mean anything anymore. I certainly don't treat it as a badge of quality and don't consult any definition of it before judging whether a particular technique in programming is useful or not.

[1]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30112738>

[2]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113932>

In its absence other people take dependencies on internal details which makes code much harder to refactor later. Lack of scoping on visibility increases the surface area of your APIs and increases the likelihood of bugs. Lack of scoping of visibility on state means losing almost all control over preservation of invariants.

Fred Brooks:

> Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.

In that situation, having to sprinkle "public"/"pub" all over them is very noisy and unproductive. It's the worst with Rust's enums, which require you to declare the visibility of variants and enclosed types of variants separately, so you see a couple "pub"-s per line of an enum definition.

That may be an argument for separate keywords for plain data, and for "APIs", although I'm not sure how I feel about it. Underneath it's just coupling of data with functions. Some languages have separate keywords for those, some don't.

However when you get to larger programs big if ... else blocks become painful. Not having a DI mechanism becomes painful. Encapsulation becomes important because you will find other parts of the program modifying something when it really shouldn't be.

I used a moan about these things until they were taken away and then I really missed them.

I read that as "one operation per test". Specifically, both:

    assertEqual(complex(1, 2) + complex(3, 5),
                complex(4, 7));

    auto c = complex(1, 2) + complex(3, 5);
    assertEqual(c.re(), 4);
    assertEqual(c.im(), 7);

    assertEqual(complex(1, 2) + complex(3, 5),
                complex(4, 7));
    assertEqual(complex(1, 2) + complex(-3, -5),
                complex(-2, -2));

    assertEqual(c.re(), 4);
    assertEqual(c.im(), 7);

In cases like this I find myself extracting a helper assert method if it gets used 3 or more times.

e.g.

  assertEqualComplex(c, 4, 7); 

    assertEqual(c.re(), x);
    assertEqual(c.im(), y);

This replaces a clear, well defined thing (assert) with a vague, ill defined thing. What constitutes an "operation"?

There's almost no point to the rule if it isnt trivial to distinguish one operation from a group.

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.

I remember going over unclebob github a while back and this wasn't the impression I got. The parts I read seemed like obtuse code that added pointless abstraction for the sake of following some convention.

It's that small changes like adding getters and setters give an easy-to-follow PR, a false sense of accomplishment for both the author and the reviewer, and ton of dopamine with that. While important changes, that actually deliver business value or repay technical debt, become increasingly difficult to do without replacing massive amounts of code and redoing the file structure.

Inertia is the biggest demotivator.

In Java (or Java like languages [C#]), which is the language they were really written for. There are many languages for which the precepts of Clean Code are not that great a fit.

Also - It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code - https://qntm.org/clean

I do think this article makes a lot of valid criticisms and it’s well worth a read. I remember being influenced by it early on but then re-read it as I gained more experience. This article sums up what I felt on rereading.

I hate commented out code, but this doesn't work in every situation. While working on a clinical information system, we had frequent "please bring it back" requests that came a few months after things were removed (also by request). Relying on source control is nice, but unless you document every feature/removal or use very extensive commit messages, finding the code that was removed (especially if it was spread over several classes) is easier if you just comment it out and write why it was commented out.

The important part here is to add why something was commented out.

You can guess, but that will leave you with many classes/functions commented out only in the hope that one day one of them will be requested to be put back. This leads to nobody daring to remove old code for months/years.

Then, one day, a new coder on the team just ask WTF is this here, realize it's outdated and not running anymore, and will remove the whole thing. Then, the "senior" guy on the team comes shouting at him/her: "We might need it one day, what do you know about our team, bla bla bla, we had a feature 4 years ago that was removed and we had to add back, so now we have the rule of commenting things out". Yuck, what a nightmare.

Just create good commit messages, don't group irrelevant changes together, and you'll be able to find the commit if you really have to. And even if you can't, you know you can still just develop that thing again, right?

This sounds like you're travelling towards burnout at supersonic speed.

Rapidly changing environment/features is just newspeak for customer has no idea what they even want in the first place and project management is non-existent.

And commented out code gets stale so quickly. Much better to check out an old version where it still worked than uncommenting a bunch of lines that now have compile errors and have become incomprehensible. Happens so easily, e.g. after some variable renames.

But I do wonder, if the better option would not have been to make the behavior that you commented out optional. Sometimes one can know beforehand whether a request is actually what people are going to want in the end. Once I wrote variant 1 of a certain feature. This was deemed not good and variant 2 was written. This was also not what people wanted so variant 3 was written. By then I got the inkling that also variant 3 would not be there to stay so I made it an option whether 2 or 3 was in effect. In the end, the final functionality was mostly a lot like variant 1 so the option turned out not be useful but maybe sometimes such optional behavior can sometimes be the best way....

Not exactly relevant to this discussion, but it sounds like a good case for a config flag. Let them turn it on and off as often as they like.

  git log -p -- file

...for trivial cases. For more complex, real-world scenarios, these kind of rules need to be applied sparingly, and where needed. Otherwise you get things like too much abstraction and several layers of inheritance, making it difficult to figure out what anything actually does - the opposite of nice to read

Uncle Bob et al have some good guidance, but cargo-culting them led to long-lasting, negative effects on some communities, such as Java and C# developers.

<< I would change "one assert per test" to "one concept per test". Uncle Bob makes a fairly big deal about how the former is a misconception. >>

I believe that's because the term Clean can be intuitively defined in opposition of quick and dirty : "I have spent a lot time on it. So it isn't quick and dirty. It's clean."

I have worked with people who were super booked up on Go4 and all the design stuff, and yet they can be fairly insufferable to work with when they parrot design advice from all this stuff, precisely because they can't explain why in every given situation. Then, on the receiving end of things, most of the criticism people who are expressing in this forum wrt to uncle bob, do so about examples where they coming from the perspective of something they understand.

I think there is A LOT of value in all of this experience, but it has 0 utility if you don't understand it. In other words, you are much better off not considering how you feel about code at all, and always sticking to doing things because you understand why. (And I'd say 'understand' means in a way that you can explain to someone else who may be skeptical). Context is key... so it's like if you're about to do a live coding demo in front of the board, then yeah, it's ok to comment stuff out - I think that's obvious. Ideally, your outcomes will be much, much better if they're coming from those 'obvious' points of view in any given situation.

Any just to be fair, doing something because you're curious, or it's fun, is just a good a reason as any, it just depends on the context.

This is why, there are other people who I've worked with, who know all that stuff - I'm talking super senior people - and yet rarely ever cite it or even mention it. Usually, they will ask questions because they're patiently trying to get you (or whomever) to see for yourself the same, all-encompassing 'obvious' reason, that overrides all the other important factors in a given context, that they already see. If you ask them why a piece of code that doesn't 'feel right' to you is the way it is, they'll usually have a story about some situation, where they just had to do it that way, and maybe it's bad now but if you were there, and knew what they knew, you would have probably done the same.

So, my point is, yes uncle bob stuff is fairly sound, but no I don't agree that we should follow it if we don't understand it and we're better off almost always sticking to what we do understand. O but also cool analogy about the quick and dirty. I just realized though that if you invert it completely it's like 'slow and clean'.

Yes, if you take them as general guidelines, not dogmatic rules with variable interpretations

The latter is exactly what his fans do

> 2 .Keep it simple stupid

> 2. Prefer polymorphism to if/else or switch/case.

No, not at odds with one another...

Whatever approach is clean or not can vary wildly by language. Or framework.

I do like clean code, but I think the article has a point: it's a very vague concept.

Suppose the program has to make a choice. When the choice exists only in 1 place, use an if/switch. When the choice exists in multiple places, polymorphism centralizes it and quickly becomes the simple option.

For example, a change in law required us to make a choice based on a date:

   If (thing.someBusinessDate < 2010-06-01) { doTheOldWay();} else{doTheNewWay();}

  interface TheWay{ edgecase1(); edgecase2();...}    
  class TheOldWay implements TheWay{...}
  class TheNewWay implements TheWay{...}
  class TheNewNewWay implements TheWay{...}
  TheWay wayDetector(thing){/* all the ifs here */}

That said, I think "simple" if/else or switches are much more common than the complex cases that fit polymorphism, so it seems a bit off to have it as a general rule to prefer polymorphism.

And notice how if one needs to add a new action, all objects are required to implement it. In typical OOP languages that touches many files even if the action is used only once.

So polymorphism works nicely if there are only few actions but many different objects, like in a typical GUI. But in cases of few objects and many actions, for example, doing a lot of different queries over few data sets it leads to a lot of boilerplate. Switch over actions will lead to less code.

- you have the same if-then-else in 3 places in code with 3 different effects

- you refactor it to polimorphism (Enum with a few overloaded methods works well in java)

- now one of these places need additional condition so you make it a little more complex

- year passes

- you have eldritch abomination of OOP instead of 3 if-then-elses with slightly different conditions because at no point someone was brave enough to refactor back into if-then-elses as the special cases piled up

Cyclomatic complexity would put if/else behind polymorphism while using lines of code and depth of inheritance would favour the if/else way.

That's the crux with software - there's not always an objectively better solution in terms readability/comprehensibility and some metrics that try to capture these qualities are inherently at odds with each other.

It has benefits, if you do not apply it dogmatically everywhere

vs

> Needless Repetition.

> 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 all into a configuration object and pass that instead, that's suddenly... okay?

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.

There is no secret to this, it's merely tests, no matter how clean my code is I would not feel confident unless I have tested my changes, whether manually or automatically and manually quickly becomes intractable.

There is the option of formal verification, but I have found the tooling to be disagreeable with me.

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.

Maybe it is a vague term. But it is not an excuse to write "bad" code. Perhaps every team need to have a "definition of clean code" for themselves.

This is the crux of it for me. I want to read code not solve code. If I have to "figure out what's going on" then it's not great code.

Am I unlucky or is what you are describing the rare exception?

But it requires a team that is committed to aggressively refactoring even the smallest of code smells, usually before even committing it. It also requires a team that is dedicated to its professionalism and not bend into a manager's will of refactoring being a time waste.

But when your team is committed to code quality, holy hell is it satisfying, easy and fast to work with. It really is like night and day. If you have not experienced the difference - I'm sorry to say - then you've just not worked with a high-quality team.

The cleanest codebases are those where the project has a focused goal and is maintained by a few developers with a low churn rate.

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

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

Often they were small dev teams in a small company that have high standards and given the trust & freedom to do things.

I think it boils down to how much the programmer actually cares and is given the necessary time to do a good job.

P.S: Been programming only for 6-7 years so can't say if my experience is any indicator.