In addition, clean code is easier for your developers to maintain and use longer since they don’t have to take extra time to understand the code before working with it themselves. As requirements change and your understanding of the problem domain deepens, adjust your code accordingly. Refactoring helps maintain clean code as the project evolves. Don’t be afraid to revisit and improve existing code when necessary. Many managers defend the schedule and requirements with passion, but that’s their job.
But thanks to the construction of dams along the Columbia and later the Snake rivers, the Northwest had enjoyed abundant electricity for much of the last half century. Along with smelting aluminum and supplying the electricity to make the nation’s nuclear warheads, it was available to heat homes and businesses. Large systems can be more understandable if they are constructed, layered, and wired together cleanly. While it’s unclear when or who developed the word “spaghetti code,” by the late 1970s, it was utilized to characterize a tangled mass of code that lacked organization. A code block that appears more than once in the code is referred to as repetitive code. This implies you’ll need to turn your code into a function.
Repetition and Complexity
Inline documentation is embedded in the code itself and can be used to explain what a specific function or piece of code does. Inline documentation is often used in combination with tools like JSDoc, which provides a standard for documenting code in JavaScript. If you’re interested in learning more about this, in this article I wrote about software architecture I expanded upon the topic of folder structures and well-known patterns you can follow. This approach is much more efficient since it eliminates the need to repeat code for similar tasks. It is also more flexible and extensible, as additional shapes can easily be added in the future.
- So every time you commit or push, it will execute a certain script or command — like run test cases or format your code.
- But still there are a few general conventions we can follow to achieve cleaner code, so let’s jump into that now.
- Consider it a practice to give your code descriptive names.
- Large systems can be more understandable if they are constructed, layered, and wired together cleanly.
- Clean code is foundational to developing programs you can easily analyze.
It exercises the creator’s rights and honors other’s rights to license their code. Code should only contain instructions that are logically sound. For instance, in JavaScript, there’s `NaN`, which stands for ‘Not-a-Number.’ It represents a numeric data type that isn’t a valid number.
Using whitespace can be incredibly powerful and normally has absolutely no downside. Sometimes in languages like JavaScript where the file size of the source code itself is important, you might want your files to be small, and that whitespace can add a few extra kilobytes. When you can, keep all your whitespace during development so the code is readable.
Formatting and Naming
It is also easier to maintain the code because bugs can be identified and fixed more easily. Clean code is vital because it helps you to communicate effectively with the subsequent person who will be working with your code. It’s critical, particularly in the software development environment, to be capable of referring to formerly written code and comprehending what it does. However, how to write clean code in c# they can still be useful recommendations for writing code that others can understand and modify in the future. I understand that we are often in a rush or would like to address our situation with a single function, so we build a function that performs many things. It is preferable to be having two or even more concise and straightforward functions than one complicated one.
If there is an issue, to add any new feature to a product or design, you will have to pause the refactor to fix the technical debt. Clean is anything that’s simple, direct & easy to understand. Clean code is a word with varying definitions but they all share a similar understanding. Duplicate code means you need to change things in multiple places when there is a change in logic and it is very error prone.
It’s not only better to look at, as it’s always clear that “i” is your iterator variable, but it’s also slightly more efficient. Adding comments to your code can be invaluable—they can quickly show what a complex function is doing or explain the order of certain operations. Keep in mind that too much commenting can sometimes have a detrimental effect by creating messier code. Sometimes a readability versus performance tradeoff pops up, but quite often the most
readable code actually is the most efficient. And sometimes, your code may be
prone to efficiency attacks, so watch out. Finally, read the “Smells and Heuristics” section of Martin’s book.
The key point is, they promised to do another thing and you need to read the code carefully to notice the side-effect. Flag arguments naturally contradict the principle of single responsibility. When you see them, you should consider dividing the function into two.
You should follow the rules and principles to get the desired results to write clean codes. This allows us to deliver top-notch quality software to our clients at the end of the day. Writing clean code is about taking certain guiding principles into consideration when programming. It is less about having concrete instructions on what to program in a specific situation and more about reflecting on one’s own development work practices.