Besides some of the very, very obvious (don’t copy/paste 100 lines of code, make it a function! Write comments for your future self who has forgotten this codebase 3 years from now!), I’m not sure how to write clean, efficient code that follows good practices.
In other words, I’m always privating my repos because I’m not sure if I’m doing some horrible beginner inefficiency/bad practice where I should be embarrassed for having written it, let alone for letting other people see it. Aside from https://refactoring.guru, where should I be learning and what should I be learning?
Someone said it before: write for test-ability. I find that code which is easier to test, is easier to read.
Also, use a linter and a code formatter. Those can be used from the get-go. They cost little and will allow you to write code without thinking too much about what it looks like.
What more, I can recommend letting the code rest for a while after having written it (1 week or more), then try to read it again and see how well you understand your own code. You’ll notice things like variable names being confusing, function names being non-descript or missing documentation, methods being too long, code branching too much, and so on.
And finally, ask for people to review the part of your code you are unsatisfied with. https://programming.dev/c/code_review isn’t very active, but I check it sometimes and try to give advice when I can.
Since the first lines of your linked site mention SOLID and design patterns, you’re already onto the right stuff there. That’s the framework side of things. Beyond that, I advise you to go study the advanced features of your preferred language so you know how to code “correctly” and idiomatically in that language (although not in a way that obscures intent). Then it’s perhaps a mental hurdle to open your repos and know that all code has imperfections. Opening it may indeed help to improve it - code review is arguably the single most useful practice in code quality.
You should try to write code using SOLID principles. You should then write one using CUPID, try following OOP patterns, functional patterns and good old procedural ones. You should develope one huge code base and then try to maintain it for years. You should build a binary in Ubuntu, in alpine, in nixos, in Mac, in Windows and try to ship them to each other. You should run your code on a bare metal server and you should try writing lambdas. You should start a green field project and a try to maintain a legacy system that none of the original authors are there yet. You should write code in a company that hires 500 people per day and lays off in thousands. You should write code for a company that has 2 engineers that have been there for years. You should write a backend, a frontend , and one that does not do all these. And you should ship them. And use them. You should write codes idiomatically and you should write them idiotically.
The idea is not that a good programmer had done all these, the idea is that no simple tip or priciple can apply to every situation. Anyone claiming that, is no more than a snake’s oil salesman. You should learn to code and design and engineer your software critically based on each situation. You should constantly learn. And you should not be afraid to go against the grain or break from the beaten path or go with the most popular mediocre choice.
use sonarlint/sonarqube
For following good practices, I highly recommend using a linter like ruff. I’ve learned a lot from it’s explanations on why my code is bad.
Also I have tried to avoid using else statements.
I think this is the kind of advice that if taken without context as a dogmatic approach, you’ll get worse code.
There are ideas around “exit early” and “balanced branches”… But they’re IMO a pretty low-value add, and the likelihood of misapplication is pretty high.
I’d be way more focused on designing for testibility.
If you focus on that, so many good design choices will fall out naturally.
Often the order that if/then are placed in can make ‘else’ unnecessary. "Exit early"is the guiding principle.
The reason to avoid ‘else’ is because if an if/then can be resolved in a few lines of code, it reduces nesting, which can make the code dramatically more readable and maintainable.
Disclaimer: I would only call my skill level as intermediate and would yield to any more senior developer here.
It’s not a hard and fast rule, but you can usually write it without the else and in fewer lines.
So take for a very contrived example a function that needs to return a non boolean value for a boolean test. A use case could be if you need to figure out a string argument for another function, such as you need to determine if you need to keep the “first” or “last” duplicate in a dataframe (I’m thinking about pandas’s df.drop_dupliactes method).
Continuing with the drop_duplicate thing let’s say we have a dataframe we need to de-duplicate but for some reason if the overall length of the dataframe is even, we need to keep the first duplicate and if the dataframe length is odd we keep the last. I don’t know why we would, but that was a very particular request from the customer and we need the money to buy more Warhammer figurines.
import pandas as pd
# With else statement
def foo(x: int) -> str:
if x%2>0:
return "last"
else:
return "first"
# No else statement, shorter.
def foo(x: int) -> str:
if x%2>0:
return "last"
return "first"
#import dataframe, deduplicate
df = pd.read_csv("c:\\path\\to\\data.csv")
dedup = df.drop_duplicates(keep=foo(len(df))
# No else statement, shorter.
def foo(x: int) -> str:
if x%2:
return "first"
return "last"
This is easier to think about for me: am I weird? Numbers can be interpreted as boolean in C but not in Go, which came later and is presumably an improvement.
