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.
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…
As it happens, it’s just an example to illustrate specifically the “extract to method” issues the author had.
Of course, in a real world scenario we want to limit mutating state, so it’s likely this method would return a Commission list, which would then be used by a Use Case class which persists it.
I’m fairly sure the advice about limiting mutating state is also in the book, though.
At the same time, you’re likely going to have a void somewhere, because some use cases are only about mutatimg something (e.g. changing something in the database).
in which case I will go one level down, to the calculateExtraCommissions() method.
In which case you will discover that the calculateExtraCommissions() function also has the same nested functions and you eventually find six subfunctions that each calculate some fraction of the extra commission, all of which could have been condensed into three lines of code in the parent function.
Following the author’s idea of clean code to the letter results in a thick and incomprehensible function soup.
If there are 6 subfunctions, that means there’s 6 levels of abstraction (assuming the method extraction was not done blindly), which further suggests that maybe they should actually be part of a different class (or classes). Why would you be interested in 6 levels of abstraction at once?
But we’re arguing hypotheticals here. Of course you can make the method implementations a complete mess, the book cannot guarantee that the person applying the principles used their brain, as well.
Because abstractions leak. Heck, abstractions are practically lies most of the time.
What’s the most time-consuming thing in programming? Writing new features? No, that’s easy. It’s figuring out where a bug is in existing code.
How do abstractions help with that? Can you tell, from the symptoms, which “level of abstraction” contains the bug? Or do you need to read through all six (or however many) “levels”, across multiple modules and functions, to find the error? Far more commonly, it’s the latter.
And, arguably worse, program misbehavior is often due to unexpected interactions between components that appear to work in isolation. This means that there isn’t a single “level of abstraction” at which the bug manifests, and also that no amount of unit testing would have prevented the bug.
How do abstractions help with that? Can you tell, from the symptoms, which “level of abstraction” contains the bug? Or do you need to read through all six (or however many) “levels”, across multiple modules and functions, to find the error?
I usually start from the lowest abstraction, where the stack trace points me and don’t need to look at the rest, because my code is written well.
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…
Why is it a
voidmethod? This only tells me that some state is mutated somewhere, but the effect is neither visible nor documented.I would expect a function called “calculate” to just return a number and not have any side effects.
You’re nitpicking.
As it happens, it’s just an example to illustrate specifically the “extract to method” issues the author had.
Of course, in a real world scenario we want to limit mutating state, so it’s likely this method would return a
Commissionlist, which would then be used by a Use Case class which persists it.I’m fairly sure the advice about limiting mutating state is also in the book, though.
At the same time, you’re likely going to have a void somewhere, because some use cases are only about mutatimg something (e.g. changing something in the database).
In which case you will discover that the calculateExtraCommissions() function also has the same nested functions and you eventually find six subfunctions that each calculate some fraction of the extra commission, all of which could have been condensed into three lines of code in the parent function.
Following the author’s idea of clean code to the letter results in a thick and incomprehensible function soup.
It’s only as incomprehensible as you make it.
If there are 6 subfunctions, that means there’s 6 levels of abstraction (assuming the method extraction was not done blindly), which further suggests that maybe they should actually be part of a different class (or classes). Why would you be interested in 6 levels of abstraction at once?
But we’re arguing hypotheticals here. Of course you can make the method implementations a complete mess, the book cannot guarantee that the person applying the principles used their brain, as well.
Because abstractions leak. Heck, abstractions are practically lies most of the time.
What’s the most time-consuming thing in programming? Writing new features? No, that’s easy. It’s figuring out where a bug is in existing code.
How do abstractions help with that? Can you tell, from the symptoms, which “level of abstraction” contains the bug? Or do you need to read through all six (or however many) “levels”, across multiple modules and functions, to find the error? Far more commonly, it’s the latter.
And, arguably worse, program misbehavior is often due to unexpected interactions between components that appear to work in isolation. This means that there isn’t a single “level of abstraction” at which the bug manifests, and also that no amount of unit testing would have prevented the bug.
I usually start from the lowest abstraction, where the stack trace points me and don’t need to look at the rest, because my code is written well.
Yeah, cause silly mistakes in one place never affect another place that’s completely unrelated.
That’s great, but surely, from time to time, you have to deal with code that other people have written?