If you ever have done consulting, mentoring or teaching on programming techniques I’m sure you have experienced joy as well as disappointment when your “students” either took on your advice and followed it in their day-to-day work or when they just did what you said as long as you sat next to them but forgot all about it the next day. The disappointing behavior often comes from them not fully appreciating, or not being able to fully recognize the advantages of your solution. (And as you are the mentor/consultant/teacher, the latter might also be your fault).
One example for that is the principle to operate on only one level of abstraction within a method or function. See here for a detailed explanation. I have been applying this technique more or less unconsciously already for a long time now and was reminded of it as the Single-Level-of-Abstraction-Principle in Robert C. Martin’s Clean Code.
I have been trying to put this principle in peoples minds for some time now but often with little success. Sure, they often do see the advantages of arriving at much more readable code but they often ignore it in their own code. Most of the time they just don’t see the necessity to create another method with a meaningful name or they content themselves just with putting a comment above some chunk of lower abstraction code (The resulting loud screams for a Extract-Method refactoring often remain unheard, too)
Lately, I did have fairly good success with one little sub-technique of this principle: constant booleans for if-statements. That is, instead of (C++ code):
void someMethod()
{
if (hard_to_read_boolean_expression_using_lower_abstractions)
{
// do stuff
}
}
you write:
void someMethod()
{
const bool expressive_name =
hard_to_read_boolean_expression_using_lower_abstractions;
if (expressive_name)
{
// do stuff
}
}
I guess the main reason for the success of this sub-technique is that it increases readability a lot at a cost that is only a tiny bit greater than a simple comment.
True, in many cases it may be even more readable to put the whole if-statement in another method, but using a boolean constant like above is already a big improvement.
Schneide Blog 