Skip to main content

Simple code extra: Readability examples

Seven ways to write the same code snippet 

Here are eight ways to write the exactly same code. Some are easier to read than others and all are a variation of a code I've seen in a real code base. My personal favorite is #7, what's yours?

 #1 One liner

DAO.filter { it.name == "foo" }.map { it.company }.toSet()

#2 two lines, three operations


DAO.filter { it.name == "foo" }
  .map { it.company }.toSet()

#3 Evaluation on it's own line


DAO.filter {
  it.name == "foo"
}.map { it.company }.toSet()

#4 Each operation and evaluation on their own lines


DAO.filter {
  it.name == "foo"
}.map { it.company }
.toSet()

#5 All function calls and evaluation on their own lines


DAO
  .filter {
    it.name == "foo"
  }.map { it.company }
  .toSet()

#6 Everything on it's own line


DAO
  .filter {
    it.name == "foo"
  }

  .map { it.company }
  .toSet()

#7 All function calls on their own lines


DAO
  .filter {  it.name == "foo" }
  .map { it.company }
  .toSet()

#8 Three lines where each operation is on it's own line


DAO.filter {  it.name == "foo" }
  .map { it.company }
  .toSet()

Popular posts from this blog

Simple code: Naming things

There are two hard things in programming and naming is one them. If you don't believe me ask Martin Fowler https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html . In this post I'll be covering some general conventions for naming things to improve readability and understandabilty of the code. There are lots of things that need a name in programming. Starting from higher abstractions to lower we need to name a project, API or library, we probably need to name the source code repository, when we get to the code we need to name our modules or packages, we give names to classes, objects, interfaces and in those we name our functions or methods and within those we name our variables. Overall a lot of things to name. TLDR; Basic rule There's a single basic convention to follow to achiveve better, more descriptive naming of things. Give it a meaningful name i.e. don't use shorthands like gen or single letter variables like a, x, z instead tell what it represents, what it does...

Simple code: Simplicity

Simplest solutions are usually the best solutions. We as software developers work with hard problems and solve a lot of small problems every day. Solving a hard problem itself is a hard job. Though in my opinion it's not enough to solve a hard problem in any possible way but a hard problem should be solved with a simple solution. When a developer comes up with a simple solution to a hard problem then they can declare the problem solved. First a disclaimer. Coming up with a simple solution to a hard problems is itself a very hard problem and takes a lot of time, effort and practice. I've seen my share of "clever" solutions for hard problems and the problem with those is that usually the solution itself is so hard to understand that depending on the size of the problem it may take a developer from hours to days or even weeks to understand how that "clever" solution works. It's a rare occasion when a developer has come up with a simple solution to a hard pr...

Simple code: Version control commits

Currently the most popular version control system is git and I'll be writing this based on git and it's functionalities and capabilities. Git is often seen as a way to enable distributed programming i.e. multiple programmers can work on the same code repository quite easily without disturbing each others work (much). In addition to that just like other VCS's it's also a log of work but to my experience that part is often unfortunately neglected. What I will be focusing this time is the log part because I think it deserves more attention. Why to create a meaningful log? The git log should consist from small meaningful changesets where each commit addresses a single problem. By dividing the log to small commits it enables resilient way of working. Being resilient enables simple and fast procedures to rollbacks, reviews, tags, branching etc. Lets say that a developer is implementing a REST API. The API needs a web layer that receives the HTTP requests, it probably has some...