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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 2 months ago* (last edited 2 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...

[-] realharo@lemm.ee 20 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Why is it a void method? 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.

[-] dandi8@fedia.io -4 points 2 months ago

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 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).

[-] realharo@lemm.ee 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It's not nitpicking, stuff like this is far more impactful than choosing between 5 lines vs 10 lines long methods, or whether the hasExtraCommissions "if" belongs inside or outside of calculateExtraCommissions. This kind of thing should immediately jump out at you as a red flag when you're reading code, it's not something to handwave away as a detail.

[-] dandi8@fedia.io -5 points 2 months ago

I never claimed it's not important, I'm just saying it's not relevant here, as there is no context to where this method was put in the code.

As I said, it might be top-level. You have to mutate state somewhere, because that's what applications ultimately do. You just don't want state mutations everywhere, because that makes bad code.

[-] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 9 points 2 months ago

The whole book is like this, though, and these are specifically supposed to be examples of "good" code. The rewritten time class toward the end, a fully rewritten Java module, is a nightmare by the time Martin finishes with it. And I'm pretty sure it has a bug, though I couldn't be bothered to type the whole thing into an editor to test it myself.

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

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