Notes from Books: Clean Code

Clean Code Principles

• DRY - don’t repeat yourself
• KISS - keep it simple and stupid
• follow standard conventions

Design

• keep configurable data at high levels
• prefer polymorphism to if/else and switch/case
• follow the law of demeter - a class should know only its direct dependencies
• be consistent

Meaningful Names

• should be intention-revealing
• don’t use ‘list’ for grouped stuff if it’s not a list (DS), use ‘group’ instead
• don’t use abbreviations
• use pronounceable and searchable names

Functions

• should do only one thing
• should be small
• ideally should have zero (niladic) or one argument (monadic), followed by two (dyadic) and three (polyadic)
• more than three requires very special justification and shouldn’t be used
• don’t pass a boolean into a function - does one thing if the flag istrue and another if the flag is false
• up to 10-20 lines

Comments

• if you’re thinking about writing a comment, then the code should be refactored
• don’t write comments if you can explain your intent in code
• comment should explain WHY
• comments can be used to warn about certain consequences
• TODO comments
• not every function needs to have docstring - it clutters up the code

Formatting

• check recommendations for lines per file
• smaller files are easier to understand than large ones