After reviewing its meaning and apply the practice in my class, I wanted to search for a good source on clean code principles and some more reasons why it is important. i came across and read an article from the Codacy blog called “What is Clean Code? A Guide to Principles and Best Practices.” This article really went into depth on what it means to have your code be clean and have it makes to not only you, but other people as well. The link to the original post is right here: https://blog.codacy.com/what-is-clean-code
One of the first things this blog states is “writing code is like giving a speech. If you use too many big words, you confuse your audience. Define every word, and you end up putting your audience to sleep.” This very starting statement is what drew me to this post. Thinking about it like this makes so much sense. I believe I am pretty decent at public speaking myself so relating code it really helps define clean code to me. This post contains nine different methods on how to do this such as following code-writing standards and refactoring continuously. The article also explains how clean code helps development teams: teamwork is way easier, debugging becomes more straightforward, and overall it helps prevent many mistakes.
In class we’ve gone over many concepts this post explains, such as DRY(don’ repeat yourself), using comments sparingly, and writing short, straight forward functions. The most backwards concept for me is the comments. In past classes many professors have told me to write lots of comments explaining what certain things do. Now I’m being told to try not to use any? It does make sense, focus on making your code readable so you don’t need any comments.
Going forward for myself, making code simply and understandable will be a main focus for me. Keeping things simple and understandable makes way more sense than making code I need comments in. Another big thing for me is eliminating repetition. Using functions and calls instead of writing the same code over and over again will one hundred percent make my computer science life way easier and save me tons of time as well. I’ve only just started writing code in teams so I’ve only ever written code for my professors or just for myself. I know that keeping this readable will prevent meetings with teammates and hours explaining what the code I’ve created does.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Works for Me by Seth Boudreau and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
Testing, testing. I may need your approval on this article I read by Software Testing Magazine on Approval Testing. Approval testing, as defined by this article, is a way of software testing that results in presenting the before and after of an application for a user (ex: software development team) to review it and potentially approve it. It’s more of a visual representation of testing and one of the major cons is how the results have to be checked manually.