Discussion on: Best Code Practices

[Patrick Pfeifer]

Very nice post. The ideas resonate well with me. Whitespace is an important aspect of code and I often find myself having very different preferences than other team members. I do not like too much of it in-between methods either.

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However, I need to bring up something important about the example you are giving for the "story telling" aspect. I think naming and story telling is equally if not more important than whitespace.

But the example unfortunately clearly violates the SLA principle described by Kent Beck, Neal Ford, Robert Martin and many others. There are plenty of articles about it. Here is a random link.

I think this is one of the most important principles. And the way in which it is violated in the example is such that the (arrow) functions are not doing what they should. Judging by their name and the fact that they are (arrow) function, they are IMHO supposed to implement functionality. Instead, they define the order of the execution, e.g. they orchestrate functionality. As a consequence, the order of execution will become very hard to understand and change as soon as more details (code) are added to the "story". This is mainly because there is no separation between "orchestration" and "implementation". And those should be separated, because two things that are not at the same level of abstraction. 1)

To make a long story short, this is how I would suggest to improve on the above mentioned issues:

class AppleHarvester {

    appleCount = 0;

    gatherAndCountAll() {
        grabBasketFromGarage();
        walkToAppleTree();
        while (treeBearsApples()) {
            pickAppleFromAppleTree();
        }
        placeAppleInBasket();
        return appleCount;
    }

    grabBasketFromGarage() {
    }

    walkToAppleTree() {
    }

    treeBearsApples() {
    }

    pickAppleFromAppleTree() {
    }

    placeAppleInBasket() {
        appleCount++;
    }
}

new AppleHarvester().gatherAndCountAll();

1) On a side-note: I very much like Ralph Westphal's thinking about the separation between "implementation" and "integration".

[Matthew Palmer]

Patrick, I really like your insight on this! It's discussions like this that make us all better developers. This is why I love our community. We end up learning so much from each other. Nothing pleases me more than clean code. Your method here saves so much space, and it is definitely something I'm putting into more practice in my own projects.