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Seeing that Uncle Bob is making a new version of Clean Code I decided to try and find this article about the original.

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[-] dandi8@fedia.io -4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It makes me sad to see people upvote this.

Robert Martin's "Clean Code" is an incredibly useful book which helps write code that Fits In Your Head, and, so far, is the closest to making your code look like instructions for an AI instead of random incantations directed at an elder being.

The principle that the author of this article argues against seems to be the very principle which helps abstract away the logic which is not necessary to understand the method.

public void calculateCommissions() {
  calculateDefaultCommissions();
  if(hasExtraCommissions()) {
    calculateExtraCommissions();
  } 
} 

Tells me all I need to know about what the method does - it calculates default commissions, and, if there are extra commissions, it calculates those, too. It doesn't matter if there's 30 private methods inside the class because I don't read the whole class top to bottom.

Instead, I may be interested in how exactly the extra commissions are calculated, in which case I will go one level down, to the calculateExtraCommissions() method.

From a decade of experience I can say that applying clean code principles results in code which is easier to work with and more robust.

Edit:

To be clear, I am not condoning the use of global state that is present in some examples in the book, or even speaking of the objective quality of some of the examples. However, the author of the article is throwing a very valuable baby with the bathwater, as the actual advice given in the book is great.

I suppose that is par for the course, though, as the aforementioned author seems to disagree with the usefulness of TDD, claiming it's not always possible...

[-] Lysergid@lemmy.ml 8 points 3 months ago

Folks really trying to argue about example code. Even created “global state” straw man. Here is secret - if you are using global state then code is shit in the most cases.

[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 2 points 3 months ago

When they say global state here it's not really global state, it's class members - global to the class. "Why are they calling it global state then, idiots?" you might think. It's because it prevents local reasoning in the same way as global state does (and most people get the implications of "global state" because of experience, so it's a kind of shorthand).

Of course, not many people would recommend "no class variables" (in a classic OOP language anyway), but the point is they have similar downsides to global variables in terms of understanding code (and testing, etc.) so recommending to always use them - even when passing state in and out of functions is perfectly ergonomic - is clearly bonkers.

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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
145 points (95.0% liked)

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