With Apologies to Uncle Bob
From the design by counter-example file, this might be the most practical definition of “unclean” code I’ve ever seen.
In the kitchen, the stuff I left on the counter is fine, I know why it’s there. Everything my family leaves on the counter is mess.
In our own software, we don’t trip over the rough edges, we can fix those later. For everyone else, our software is rough.
In your own kitchen, you don’t see your own clutter. It’s not bad, but there’s not a lot of available workspace. Similarly, that’s why everyone else’s code is not clean, but your code is. At least in your eyes.
Clean code is good goal. And there are lots of heuristics and rules of thumb to help you get write clean code. You should always be thinking about them. Not blindly following them, but thinking about them. And you need to be aware of your biases and blind spots.
And one of the biggest, the one that makes identifying your own unclean code, is the same one that makes it hard to accurately and effectively edit your own writing. It’s a problem of context. When you’re writing, whether it’s code, a novel, an email, or a text message, you have an immense amount of context. When you go back to review/edit that text, unless it’s been a long time, you still have all that context. And even if it has been a long time, that context will come back pretty quickly. That means you don’t see the missing or doubled words. You don’t see the misspellings. You don’t notice that your functions are long, that you have complicated conditionals, or that function and variable names no longer match what they actually do.
Unfortunately, unless you’re the copy editor for someone, everyone else has much less context. They don’t know what you know and they see those things immediately. It makes it hard for them to understand your code. Just like it makes it hard for you to understand their code.
Or to work in someone else’s kitchen.
So the next time you’re reviewing your own code prior to getting someone else to review it, make sure you’re looking at not just with your own context, but also the context of someone who hasn’t seen it before.
