This week’s topic I decided to choose a blog post about the writing of clean code to correlate with what we’ve been learning in class. The blog post, published by Jacob On Software, details how the writer has been reading Clean Code by Robert Martin. This handbook identifies the significance of writing clean code, as well as, how to properly write readable and professional code. Jacob On Software takes a unique and effective approach to teach readers; refactoring one of his old projects. Jacob states in his blog post that during this project, he was forced to learn how to create a full stack web application in just three weeks, resulting in him rushing and writing not so clean code. The blog post highlights that other contributors working on his project will have strenuous time trying to decipher his messy code, hindering the development process and evolution of the software.
Looking at an image of the his code, we can see that the name of his functions are descriptive of what they accomplish, however the functions themselves have too many lines of code, which is a crucial aspect detailed in the Clean Code book. Having functions that are thousands of lines long makes it a nightmare to understand what the function is doing. Clean Code emphasizes that functions should be small and straight to the point. Jacob fixes his code by splitting up the function into smaller functions. Additionally, Martin’s Clean Code stresses that a function should do one thing. Previously, Jacob’s function was performing multiple operations like holding data and updating it. These operations were split up into their own functions, allowing others to instantly understand the purpose of these functions.
Further into the blog, Jacob talks about the formatting of his code. The more lines a file has, the harder it is to understand. Users only have a limited amount code that will fit on their screen at once. If the developer has to constantly scroll up and down through hundreds of lines just to understand your code, you are not writing clean code. The same can be said horizontally, lines in your code should not be extending off to the right of the screen.
I chose this topic because after looking at the examples of bad code and good code in class, I admit that most of my code that I’ve written in other classes would be considered bad code. Non-descriptive variable/function names and multiple operations in functions have definitely been a weakness in my code. It’s crucial to write clean code as software developer working in a team so other team members can easily understand your code. I plan to use this information as a guideline on how to write more descriptive and readable code in the future.
Blog Post: https://medium.com/codex/reading-clean-code-week-2-643641e4dc28
From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Through a Junior by Winston Luu and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.