Clean Code

During this last week of class, I have been learning about clean code and how to write it as well as edit my previously written code in order to follow these guidelines. Clean code is exactly what it sounds like. It is code that is easy to read and understand, and isn’t too complicated or formatted poorly. Learning how to write clean code is going to be vital in working in the computer science industry. Everyone in this industry works with another programmer at some point in time, so having clean code will make their life and your life easier. While researching more about how to write clean code, I found a website called freecodecamp that does a great job explaining attributes of clean code while also giving examples. On top of explaining how to do it, it also has a section explaining why you should care about writing clean code. Personally, this really helped me understand why clean code is needed and why it is very important to understand.

The three main aspects of clean code are effectiveness, efficiency, and simplicity. Effectiveness is pretty self-explanatory. It means that the program should be able to solve the problem that it was designed to solve, otherwise it isn’t helpful. Once the program is considered to be effective, we need to also make sure that it is efficient. If a program solves a simple addition problem, but takes 36 hours to run, the program isn’t efficient as there are much faster and more simple solutions. If your program is post effective and efficient, then you also need to make sure that it has simplicity. While most sites will have different qualifications for simplicity, I think freecodecamp has most of them. Freecodecamp wants everyone that is trying to write clean code to ask themselves these questions about the code:

1. “Can you easily understand what the program does at each line?
2. Do functions and variables have names that clearly represent their responsibilities?
3. Is the code indented correctly and spaced with the same format all along the codebase?
4. Is there any documentation available for the code? Are comments used to explain complex parts of the program?
5. How quick can you identify in which part of the codebase are certain features of the program? Can you delete/add new features without the need of modifying many other parts of the code?
6. Does the code follow a modular approach, with different features separated in components?
7. Is code reused when possible?
8. Are the same architecture, design, and implementation decisions followed equally all along the codebase?”

While there are a ton of other ways that you can improve your code, these are the 3 main factors. Without these 3 foundational factors, you wouldn’t be able to write clean code which would make life harder for you and for everyone that reads your code.

Synopsis: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-write-clean-code/#what-does-it-mean-to-write-clean-code-and-why-should-i-care