“Uncle Bob” is Robert Martin of CleanCoder. You may have heard of the Agile Alliance, Extreme Programming, and the SOLID principles. That’s “Uncle Bob”.

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• Code is messy to start because coding is hard
• It’s still messy when it works for the first time
• But at that point people move on to the next thing that doesn’t work
• Your job is to write code other people can maintain
• Old code trains new people to write old code
• The only way to go fast is to go well (or, in my world “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”)

What is clean code?

• Kent Beck -
• Bjarne Stroustrup - “clean code does one thing well”
• Grady Booch - “Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well-written prose…”
• Ward Cunningham - “You know you are working on clean code when each routine you read turns out to be pretty much what you expected”

The Rules of Functions

1. They should be small
2. They should be smaller than that

• A small function is a bit of code from which you can’t extract smaller functionality
• not large enough to hold nested structures (indent level <= 2 )
• three arguments is a good number
• if the arguments go together, maybe they belong to some object that groups them
• don’t pass booleans—instead decompose function into two functions that represent each branch
• avoid switch statements (use polymorphism instead—open/closed principle)
• a function that returns void must have a side effect, or its pointless
• a function that returns a value must not have a side effect, by convention
• prefer exceptions to returning error codes (Java thing)
• don’t repeat yourself
• structured programming - Edsger Dijkstra

Also in this series

• Lesson 1 - Clean Code
• Lesson 2 - Comments
• Lesson 3 - Professionalism
• Lesson 4 - Test Driven Development
• Lesson 5 - Good Software Architecture
• Lesson 6 - Production vs. Development