One thing that fascinates me about software development is the fact that we aren’t done yet as a profession, we just barely started. New paradigms, programming languages and concepts, even new technologies are invented, discovered and refined at every moment. Add a personal journey of skill acquisition and improvement, and it’s enough for a fulfilled professional life. But as a Clean Code Developer, I often pause and reflect – on me, my work and why I do it in this particular way. I’m aware that I’m on a perpetuating process of self-improvement, always better than yesterday (hopefully), but never as good as I want to be. Reflecting the changes and transformations I made in the past helps me to understand changes in the present or even in the future. So this is a blog entry about mistakes, probably embarrassing ones, that I really made and didn’t think anything was wrong at some point in my professional career.
But before I make my confessions, please keep this disclaimer in mind: Most of these mistakes, I made in the ancient days of my schooling and early steps. I’ve come a long way since, read a ton of books, wrote several big software systems and switched programming languages several times. I didn’t write this to make fun of my past self, but to gather (and provide) insight into the mind of an apprentice and how he rationalizes aspects of software development that seem out of place or even funny to more experienced developers. The purpose is to be more aware of more recent sketchy rationalizations, not to laugh about how stupid I was – even if I’ve probably been stupid.
No indentation
Origin:
Yes, really. I started my professional/academic career with strictly left-aligned code and no sense of the value of indentation. It just seemed meaningless “additional effort” to me. Let me explain why while you laugh. I started my career with BASIC, and after years of tinkering around and finally reading books about it (this was long before the world wide web, mind you!), discovered that I could circumvent the limitations of the runtime by directly PEEKing and POKEing to the memory. Essentially, I began to write machine code in BASIC. As soon as I had this figured out, my language of choice was now assembler, because why drill holes into BASIC every time I wanted to do something meaningful (like changing the VGA palette mid-frame to have more than 256 colours available). Years of assembler programming followed. Assembler isn’t like any other programming language, it’s more of a halfway de-scrambled machine code and as such has no higher concepts like loops or if-else statements. This is more or less like every program in assembler looks like:
push 20h call 401010 add esp,4 xor eax,eax ret
You’ve probably already guessed where this leads to: In assembler, all scoping/blocking of code has to be done by the programmer in his head. There was no value in indentation because there was no hierarchy of statements and everything was on the same level of (nearly non-existent) abstraction. I got used to the level of attention you have to maintain to keep track of your code. So when I started programming in Java during my study, the hard nut to crack was object orientation, not the simple task of understanding code without indentation.
Mistake:
It didn’t occur to me that my code was hard to understand for other readers (e.g. my tutor) without proper formatting. Code was cryptic and hard to understand, so what? I didn’t regard obfuscation as a problem, but was proud to be “one of the few” who could actually understand what was going on.
Remedy:
I’ve come a long way since. Nearly two decades in application development taught me to write, structure and format my code as clearly as I can – and always add some extra effort into clarity. Good code is readable, and readable code is understandable by virtually everybody, not only a chosen few. Indentation is a very important tool to lead the reader (and yourself) through your program. It’s no coincidence that the first rule of the Object Calisthenics deals with indentation.
Single return functions
Origin:
This one also roots in my first years of programming BASIC and assembler. In assembler, you never think about anything other than one clear exit from a subroutine, because you need to restore all register context before the jump back by hand. In BASIC, there was that lingering danger that you couldn’t break free from a loop or a routine too early because the interpreter would mess up its internal context. If you were inside a loop and left the subroutine by “Exit Sub” command, the loop context was still present and ready to bite you.
In short, everything else but a clearly cut exit strategy from a function was dangerous and error prone. The additional code infrastructure needed to maintain such a programming style, e.g. additional local variables and blown-up conditionals were necessary costs in my book. To be honest, I didn’t even think about any alternative, because in my reality, you needed to care about your stack content even in BASIC.
Mistake:
I didn’t think about ways to minimize my effort in micromanaging the computer. In my defense, this would have totally alienated assembler programming for me. Assembler is all about micromanagement and CPU nursery. It didn’t occur to me that my value system (stack handling is coder’s work) limited my ability to express the goals of a function (instead of its minutiae).
Remedy:
Great recapulations of most arguments against single return functions can be found in the C2 wiki and various other internet sources like this great question on stackexchange.com
I dropped this style quickly when finally wrapping my head around the fact that the Java VM handles all memory including the stack for me and doesn’t want me to interfere (or “optimize”). Once freed from micromanagement issues, you can adapt your stylistic choice to the matter at hand and write code that supports your problem domain instead of adhering to limitations from the technical domain.
Special naming conventions for interfaces
Origin:
One of the hardest topics in object-oriented programming for me was the concept of “abstract” classes or even those mysterious interfaces. What’s the use of an interface anyway when it doesn’t even contain code? It seemed like additional work without benefit for me. And with a programming style that stores everything in primitive data types (where else?), interfaces just don’t cut it. So I adopted a style that marks everything dubious with extra prefixes to move it out of the way when it comes to naming. Let’s say I want to program a class that represents a user (class User), but are somehow forced or tempted to create an interface for it? Just name it IUser! It’s such a no-brainer that interfaces didn’t require any effort in their creation. And while we are at it, let’s name all abstract classes AbstractXYZ, because that’s much better than the alternative – to name the concrete class XYZImpl (disclaimer: both options are flawed). Cool, a new concept in Java 5 were Enums, let’s prefix them with “big E” so we can always tell them apart. And while we are at it, every exception should end with… well, I think you can guess.
Mistake:
I’m happy to announce that I never fell in the Hungarian notation trap. But that doesn’t serve as an excuse for the type name prefix mess I maintained longer than I’m willing to admit. The mistake was to overburden type names with implementation details and let the technical domain leak into my type system.
Remedy:
One day, I decided to cut it out and began to eliminate prefixes and suffixes in type names. It started a process of discoveries, insights and new possibilities much like in the case of single return functions. And the process isn’t even finished yet. Just recently, Kevlin Henney came along and gave me another push forward on my journey to really good type names (Seven ineffective coding habits of many programmers). As a reminder: The compiler doesn’t care about your names. Most readers don’t care about the actual technical realization of a type as long as they know what the type is for in the problem domain. Even you yourself don’t care about prefixes in the name once the name-finding phase is past. Let me phrase this facetious: “Equal naming rules for all types of types!”
Only the beginning
These three examples are only the beginning of a whole list of mistakes, misconceptions and plain falsities of mine. I hope you’ll see the intention behind the confession, not only the amusing part of self-revelation. Try it on yourself! Think back to your early days as a software developer and write down the funny things you worked with and were proud of. Then try to fit them into the scheme: How did you start doing it? Why exactly was it a mistake (in the long run)? And what was the aspect that drove you away from it? How did you fix your mistake?
I would love to hear and learn from your mistakes, too.
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