- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
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I’ve been rallying against clever code for years!
Sure, it makes you have less lines for your l33t code solutions, but in the real world, it sacrifices the maintainability of code that others will eventually work on.
Between a clever 1 line fix and maintainable 10 line fix, I’ll choose the 10 line every time.
As an extensive commenter, I completely agree.
I need to know wtf I was doing, making it convoluted to save a few lines is pointless.
It’s often a good idea to make the code itself very explicit through verbose function and variable names, rather than writing comments that could lead to inconsistencies between code and comments (by not updating the comments at the same time as the code) (see “Fallacious Comments” from the catalog)
“Some people do a bad job commenting and updating comments, so lets not do comments” is not an approach that works for me.
Most of my code is at the prototype level. I’m concepting something out, usually paired with hardware.
If someone can’t follow what I’m doing, its going to lead to problems. If a change happens to the hardware being controlled, code will not be good enough on its own.
Rather than being accepting of bad commenting practice, make comments (and updating them properly) part of good practice. In my experience, It saves time in the long run and leads to better code at the end.
That’s not what I said. I said that comments can often (but not always) be replaced with good and explicit names.
This can be pushed to some extreme by making functions that only get called at a single place in the code, just for the sake of being able to give a name to the code that’s inside (instead of inlining it and adding a comment that conveys the same informations as the function’s signature)
It’s definetly not for everyone, but for beginners/juniors it gives something objective they can aim for when trying to build good coding habits
I am going to disagree, comments should be an explanation.
The code is what’s being done, a comment should be why its being done.
I’m not sure how we disagree. At least, I don’t disagree with you. My whole comment was talking about “what” comments. “Why” comments are a very good thing to have where they’re needed
Not updating comments with code is what I’m talking about - that’s not a comment problem, thats a programmer problem.
If they aren’t updating the “why”, that programmer is the problem, not comments.
10 lines is a bit much, that’s hardly more readable than one.
Then again, it depends on the language.
I feel like if one tried to follow all of these “rules” at all times nothing would get done, at all.
A code smell isn’t supposed to be automatically bad. A smell is an indication that something might be wrong. Sometimes using a smelly pattern is legitimately the only way to do something.
Apart from the fact that, as another commenter said, “smells” are not “rules”, I think most of these points come down to developing good habits, and ultimately save a lot of time in the long run by initially spending some time thinking about maintainability and preventing/limiting technical debt accumulation.
half of these will make your code better lmao
which half?
I’ll never tell
I’m not going through every one, but null checks, vertical separation, status variables and binary operator in name, are all things that often make your code better and more readable
My code is exclusively Complicated Regular Expressions and it’s screaming fast.
Like all things programming; It Depends.
I think to present rules like this as hard rules, with little explanation and no nuance is harmful to less experienced engineers.
A prime example here is the Duplicated Code one. Which takes an absolute approach to code duplication, even when the book that is referenced highlights the Rule of Three:
The Rule of Three Here’s a guideline Don Roberts gave me: The first time you do something, you just do it. The second time you do something similar, you wince at the duplication, but you do the duplicate thing anyway. The third time you do something similar, you refactor. Or for those who like baseball: Three strikes, then you refactor.I’ve seen more junior devs bend over backwards, make their code worse and take twice as long to adhere to some rules that are really more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.
Sure, try to avoid code duplication, but sometimes duplicating code is better than the wrangling you’d need to do to remove it.
Making extra changes also leaves extra room for bugs to creep in. So now you need to test the place you were working, and anywhere else you touched because of the refactoring.
Well it’s in the name, they are code smells, not hard rules.
Regarding the specific example you cited, I think that with practice it becomes gradually more natural to write reusable functions and methods on the first iteration, removing the need for later DRY-related refactorings.
PS : I love how your quote for the Rule of Three is getting syntax highlighted xD (You can use markdown quotes by starting quoted lines with
>)The site doesn’t define what a code smell is, though. It’s just a list of Don’t Do’s.
That’s kind of the nuance I would be hoping for.
Something like:
Code Smells are clues that something is amiss. They are not things that always must be ‘fixed’. You as an engineer will, through experience in your own codebase and reading of others, develop a sense of the harm imparted by and the cost of fixing Code Smells. It is up to you and your team to decide what is best for your codebase and project.
(The rule of 3 formatting was intentional, given the community we’re in)
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Works fine for me. Which OS and browser are you using ?
