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Whatever 'Clean Code' you write now, it'll be shit eventually and in need of a complete rewrite
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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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I genuinely think his book is rubbish. I agree with some of his points. Most of the good points are common sense. For the most part I heavily disagree with the book.
Throughout the book he has examples of programs where he shows before and after he applies “clean code”, and in almost all examples it was better how it was before.
I can write a lot about why I don’t like his book. He doesn’t make many compelling arguments. It’s mostly based on what he feels is good. He often contradicts himself as well. If I remember correctly, he has a section about how side effects are bad. I agree with him on this part. Shortly after, he proudly shows an example of “clean” program - and it’s littered with awful side effects!
He also has this weird obsession of hiding the logic of the program. As a programmer, I want all relevant logic of a method to be neatly collected in one place - not scattered around deeply nested method calls.
I can go on and on. I hate this book with a passion.
Sorry, I still don't really get the hate.
I use what I learned from watching a talk by him on clean code and I had to learn some stuff. It might be "common sense" for experienced developers. But it certainly doesn't come naturally that "functions should do one thing" to first time coders. The thought processes of when the software was developed usually isn't the best way the code should be structured in the end. But that's usually how beginners code.
In most diciplines, experience in the field is what makes the knowledge of the field. You don't always have to be able to explain why good practice does what it does.
Also: I know of some examples, where he clearly explains his reasoning, e.g. why comments shouldn't explain how the code works. (Because they're not going to be updated, when the code will be)
Either you misrepresent him, or you get a hard nope from me. Staying on one layer of abstraction is most likely my most important principle of writing understandable and maintainable code.
I categorize this as one of the better points of the book.
I kinda disagree with him on this point. I wouldn’t necessarily limit to one thing, but I think functions should preferably be minimal.
Throughout his examples he’s also using ideas like how functions should only be 3 lines long, preferably have no arguments, and also no return values.
This style of coding leads to programs that are nightmarish to work with. The relevant code you’re looking for might be 10 layers deep of function calls, but you don’t know where. You’re just jumping between functions that does barely nothing until you find the thing you’re looking for, and then you need to figure out how everything is connected together.
I prefer when things are flatter. This generally leads to more maintainable code as it’s immediately obvious what the code is doing and how everything is connected.
I think his book is the equivalent of a cleaning guide where all the steps are just to sweep all the mess under the carpet. It looks cleaner, but it’s not clean.
I do actually agree with him on that point - functions should do one thing. Though I generally disagree on what one thing is. It is a useless vague term and he tends to lean on the smallest possible thing a thing can be. I tend to lean on larger ideas - a function should do one thing, even if that one thing needs 100s of lines to do. Where the line of what one thing is, is a very hard hard idea to define though.
IMO a better metric is that code that changes together should live together. No jumping around lots of functions or files when you need to change something. And split things out when the idea of what they do can be isolated and abstracted away without taking away from the meaning of what the original function was doing. Rather than trying to split everything up in to 1-3 line functions - that is terrible advice.
Yeah, that’s an argument of semantics. I agree with you.
What I believe is that functions should do exactly what they advertise. If they do the things they’re supposed to do, but also do other things they’re not supposed to do, then they’re not minimal.
But I feel like Uncle Bob is leaning more towards that if a task requires 100 different operations, then that should be split into 100 different functions. One operation is one thing. Maybe not exactly, but that’s kind of vibes I get from his examples.
Oh yeah he defiantly does. He even says so in other advice like a function should be about 1-3 lines. Which IMO is just insane advice.