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: Readability

Readability, understandability, two key incredients of great code. Easier said than done, right? What one person finds easy to read and understand another one finds incomprehensible. This is especially true when programmers have different levels of understanding on various subjects e.g. object oriented vs. functional or Node.js vs. Java. Even though there are obvious differences between paradigms and programming ecosystems there are some common conventions and ways to lower the barrier. Different approaches It's natural that in programming things happen sequentally e.g. you can have a list of objects and you need to do various things to the list like filter some values out and count a sum of the remaining objects based on some property. With the given list const stories = [   {name: "authentication", points: 43},   {name: "profile page", points: 11},   {name: "shopping cart", points: 24},   {name: "shopping history", points: 15},   {name: &qu

Sharing to help myself

It's been a while since my last post but I have a good excuse. I've been in a new customer project (well new for me) for two months now and have absorbed a lot of new information on the technology stack and the project itself. This time I'll be sharing a short post about sharing code and how it can help the one who's sharing the code. I'll be giving a real life example of how it happened to me. My story Back when I was implementing first version of my simple-todo REST-service I used Scala and Play framework for the service and specs2 for testing the implementation. Since then I've done a few other implementations of the service but I've continued to use specs2 as a testing framework. I wrote about my implementation and shared the post through various services and as a result someone forked my work and gave me some pointers on how I could improve my tests. That someone was Eric Torreborre  the man behind specs2 framework. I didn't take his ref

Simple code: Immutability

Immutability is a special thing that in my mind deserves a short explanation and praise. If you're familiar with functional programming you surely recognice the concept of immutability because it's a key ingredient of the paradigm. In the world of object oriented programming it's not as used and as easy to use approach but there are ways to incorporate immutability to parts of the code and I strongly suggest you to do so. Quick intro to immutablity The basic idea of immutability is unchangeable data.  Lets take a example. We have a need to modify a object's property but because the object is immutable we can't just change value but instead we make a copy of the object and while making the copy we provide the new value for the copy. In code it looks something like this. val pencil = Product(name = "Pencil", category = "Office supply") val blackMarker = pencil.copy(name = "Black marker") The same idea can be applied in functions and metho