CommunityNews

CommunityNews

There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

Everyone seems to be striving for ‘clean’ code at the moment. You can’t read a blog post without the author telling you how clean their approach is. Engineering teams get together and discuss which of the possible solutions is the cleanest. Other developers assure you that they practice ‘clean code’.

I’ve come to a realisation though. There’s no such thing as clean code.

Read in full here:

https://www.steveonstuff.com/2022/01/27/no-such-thing-as-clean-code

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Most Liked

davearonson

davearonson

Not exactly “no such thing”, more like quite the opposite, “too many things”. :slight_smile: Somewhat like “quality software”, tossed around with mostly no definition, or occasionally too many definitions. (That’s why, in the spirit of XKCD 967, I’m making One Definition To Rule Them All – results so far at Codosaurus: ACRUMEN .)

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

Quite true.

I personally read “clean code” as “something I can pick up in 5 minutes if I haven’t touched the code base in a year” which is IMO a good pragmatic way of looking at it.

But too many people have been living in poverty, became programmers and skipped five social ladder steps in the upwards direction… and then super quickly became insufferable snobs that started writing bullshit like “clean code aesthete” in their biographies. :person_facepalming: (Yes, I’ve actually seen that and was flabbergasted)

The older I get the more extreme I become. Our area needs a serious cleanup. :expressionless:

davearonson

davearonson

(Sorry for the delayed reply, I’m catching up after a week of vacation!)

Yes, good clean code would be easier to pivot with… but in the time it takes for the business side to decide what to pivot to, the dev side can get started cleaning up the code a bit, plus there’s a fairly large chance that the whole codebase will get chucked and rewritten anyway, or that the biz will just go totally bust and not have a chance to pivot into anything.

As for monoliths, yes, it’s an argument for doing things the easy way. Building a monolith, whether majestic or not, is much easier and faster than deciding where to split things up into microservices, and figuring out how to make them all communicate properly. You can certainly start it as a monolith, and tear off chunks to be microservices later. Again, yes, this will be easier with good clean code… but that’s an investment that you might well not have a chance to cash in. You can also tear off chunks in just a conceptual manner, and reimplement the code differently, perhaps more cleanly this time (since it will probably last longer this time).

But that does bring up an idea… maybe a framework based around microservices in the first place? Say for instance we started with Rails but added microservices for various common things to add on, like various kinds of user management, especially authentication and profiles, maybe authorization, into microservices. Or provided a common foundation for making microservices, so if you needed to split off a service for certain kinds of PII or PHI or credit card data or anything else sensitive, or anything else that might otherwise make sense to split out, you could start that microservice from a common basis, much like how so many apps start from the basis of Rails. Think that might be useful?

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

First poster: dimitarvp
skiftOS is a simple, handmade operating system for the x86 platform, aiming for clean and pretty APIs while keeping the spirit of UNIX. s...
New
First poster: mafinar
F# Is The Best Coding Language Today. If you want to personally pick up a programming language in order to become a better coder in what...
New
First poster: AstonJ
We engineered a wearable microphone jammer that is capable of disabling microphones in its user’s surroundings, including hidden micropho...
New
First poster: Maartz
This Keyboard Lets People Type So Fast It’s Banned From Typing Competitions. A new peripheral lets you keep typing without ever lifting ...
New
First poster: OvermindDL1
You can now buy a 100W USB-C cable with a built-in power meter. They’re just $20 on Amazon, and they work!
New
First poster: bot
The overengineered Solution to my Pigeon Problem. TL;DR: I built a wifi-equipped water gun to shoot the pigeons on my balcony, controlle...
New
First poster: Korbin73
Whatever happened to Elm, anyway?. I see this question pop up quite frequently in lots of different arenas - folks are curious as to wha...
New
First poster: FatimaAdamu
Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT. Law firm also penalised after chatbot invented six legal cases th...
New
First poster: jkdiaz
Dark mode isn’t as good for your eyes as you believe. The shadowy display mode has leagues of fans claiming it helps reduce eye strain, ...
New
New

Other popular topics Top

DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
DevotionGeo
I know that -t flag is used along with -i flag for getting an interactive shell. But I cannot digest what the man page for docker run com...
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
Rainer
Not sure if following fits exactly this thread, or if we should have a hobby thread… For many years I’m designing and building model air...
New
Exadra37
I am asking for any distro that only has the bare-bones to be able to get a shell in the server and then just install the packages as we ...
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1143 25883 760
New
AstonJ
If you get Can't find emacs in your PATH when trying to install Doom Emacs on your Mac you… just… need to install Emacs first! :lol: bre...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Jamis Buck @jamis This month, we have the pleasure of spotlighting author Jamis Buck, who has written Mazes for Prog...
New
AstonJ
This is a very quick guide, you just need to: Download LM Studio: https://lmstudio.ai/ Click on search Type DeepSeek, then select the o...
New
Fl4m3Ph03n1x
Background Lately I am in a quest to find a good quality TTS ai generation tool to run locally in order to create audio for some videos I...
New