“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”.

I align much less loosely with Uncle Bob’s advice in this lesson than the one on Lesson 1 - Clean Code. I think part of that is the different ways of thinking about Java/C++ and anything else.

What is the purpose of a comment?

• to explain the purpose of the code if the code can’t do it on its own
• nothing is quite so helpful as a good comment
• nothing is quite as bad as an obscuring comment
• proper use is to compensate for our failure to express ourselves in code
• every use of a comment represents a failure
• comments lie
  • degrade over time
  • migrate
  • people don’t update comments
• put the effort into the code, not the comment
• mandated comments (every var must be…) are stupid comments

Source files

• How long should a source file be?

Rule for variable names

• Length of name proportional to length of scope

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