Open Discussion: What Tips Do You Have For Writing Clean Code?

My advise would be to ask the following two questions repeatedly after you are 'done' writing your code:

1. "Can I do this with less code?"
2. "Can I improve the readability / understandability of the code?"

If you repeat this often enough you will get to a point where these steps would remove and add the same piece of code. Stop at the more readable version.

The great thing about this cycle is that it scales with your experience and is applicable to all programming languages.

التكثيف من كتابة التعليمات البرمجة لتسهيل مهمه الباحث المهتم لعلم البرمجيات
واتمنى ان تكون الخيارات حاضرة لمساعدة المبتدئين في علم البرمجة شكرا لكم

hmm.. I don't like that approach. I've never tried it but I feel like that would slow me down. I preffer modular and small css files. Another thing I like doing is using the id attribute to distinguish the different sections. So I can write styles like so #info_card .title which makes it easier to find the section I need to work in.

To me, a clean code rule has to be something that is worth the effort in the end.
I'm not that fast at alphabetical sorting, so I would take a lot of extra time and it would exceed the benefits it could provide.
My favourite type of sorting is the one my IDE does on autoformat.

I have a simple, modest suggestion: Almost every programming ecosystem has tools (pretty-printers, code formatters, or code beautifiers, depending on how old your language is...) to enforce a style. Just do what they say for new code, instead of arguing about style. Don't like that style? Use the same tool, configured to whatever style that you would prefer to look at.

Seriously, after sixty years of code, we need to stop wasting time arguing over style preferences. Let cb, prettier, gofmt, rustfmt, or whatever do that thinking. The format doesn't matter, as long as everybody commits to the same standard. An exception, as hinted above: Leave the pre-beautifier code alone, until you need to change it. Nobody needs a ticket to automatically fix the indentation on a million lines of code written before they were born...

And then the time saved on arguing about format can go to fixing all the warnings that the linter keeps complaining about that you either don't know about because you're not running your linter, or have been ignoring because "it's only a warning."

Try to create a function with a readable name whenever you want to better describe a piece of logic on your code.
Also try to bring together code that are "speaking" about the same topic.

If you struggle in doing the above, write some comment to describe the code. I don't think 100% that the code should be self-documented, but I believe that we should try our best to avoid comments :)

Writing CSS properties in alphabetical order? I fail to see how this can make the code clearer; maybe it helps when you are searching for a property, but Ctrl-F (or Ctrl-s if you are an emacsian) works fine too.

To me "clean code" means code that makes it easier to understand what its goal is and how it achieves it. In this respect, I find that using meaningful names for variables, functions, etc. helps a lot. Using some comment to explain the goal of the function, module, etc, and the "conceptual model" behind it helps a lot too (and this is a kind of comment that is unlikely to get stale, since it is related to the overall architecture). Comments explain the algorithm can be helpful if the algorithm is not trivial and/or to explain some choices that seem strange at first sight (e.g., "We use this structure instead of the more obvious ... because later we need to ...")

To me, it's usually a triangle: Efficiency, readability, abstraction.
However, it's rarely the same distribution, as it can vary from one project to another, depending on the context. I can't give a general rule but this how I see the project in terms of clean code.

You can't neglect performances but you have to avoid micro-optimization, especially when the code becomes too "ninja", a.k.a. less readable and maintainable. If you're the only one who can modify the script, it can become a problem quickly.

Too much abstraction is not really good in my experience. It can jam code reviews significantly. Besides, you can get a lot of unwanted side effects, so more stress for maintenance, etc.

Imagine while coding the colleague who has to maintain the code after you is a violent psychopath who knows where you live. 😅

About the article, I feel that is more personal taste than some pragmatic thing. There is a big difference between opinion (which everyone has) and well-known metrics such as SLOC, Cyclomatic Complexity and so on.

As tips, I suggest reading those books:

• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
• The Pragmatic Programmer
• 99 Bottles of OOP
• Refactoring
• Domain Driven Design
• Extreme Programming Explained

As a general rules of thumb that I like to follow:

• Follow Tell, Don't Ask when possible, but not become too dogmatic about that
• Law of Demeter is not a law, but it helps drive the code to a good and maintainable future
• Start writing acceptance (e2e) tests, then write unit/integration tests, then write the code. This helps a lot organizing ideas and communication between the parts, without writing all the base classes upfront.
• ReadMe driven development help organize what to do first and this impact directly to the code organization
• Know your tools, this help you to use your tools to write your code.
• Use dependency injection, even if it needs to be done in a manual way.
• Write code for humans, not for machine.
• (questionable taste) Switch/case isn't evil. Use it in factories to help to use polymorphism
• (questionable taste) Do not put repeated prefixes or suffixes, like "UseCase", "I", "Service", "Entity" and so on (unless if needed to work, like the prefix use in React Hooks). Each object should tell a story, each object should deserve its place in the source code by the story that it tells, not by its name.

1. Don't be lazy about typing. Abbreviations harm readability.
2. Don't encode data in your control flow. switch/case is evil.
3. Don't implement what you need right now. Think in abstracts.