Clean Code – Formatting Matters

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Ever judged a book by its cover? Of course you have. Ever passed judgement on some code simply because it didn’t look pretty? There’s more to writing code than having it functional and in this episode we dive into the reasons code formatting actually matters. Who wins the newspaper format debate?! Leave us a comment and let us know!

For the full show notes visit:
https://www.codingblocks.net/episode50

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Survey

Formatting

If your code is a mess, then people will assume that your attention to detail in how the app was coded is also a mess – perception
Teams should adopt formatting rules and follow them
Automated tools help with the process
“Code formatting is important”
Code formatting has a direct affect on maintainability and extensibility of code over time

Vertical Formatting

Try to keep max length around 500 lines long and smaller is better – FitNesse app is in this range
Tomcat and Ant – several thousand lines long and at least half are over 200
Newspaper metaphor – read it vertically – headlines at the top detail increases as we go down the page
Separate concepts with blank lines
Closely associated code should be grouped together so it’s dense
Concepts (methods) that are closely related should be grouped as closely together as possible to keep from hunting through files
Variable declarations should be as close to their usage as possible
If the methods are short, then the variable declarations should be at the top of the function!
Control variables for loop should be defined within the loop
Instance variables should be declared at the top of a class
When one function calls another, those should be close vertically in the file
Conceptual affinity – when methods do similar things or are named similarly, they should also appear close to each other
Vertical ordering of methods – the caller should be first, then the callee, and that method’s callee, etc…on down the page

New Survey
New Macbooks
– Death of Macbook Pro?
– The beginning of a new awesome era?

Horizontal Formatting

How wide should a line be?!
In the popular projects examined, it appeared that 40% of lines were between 20 and 60 characters
Another 30% of lines were less than 10 characters…
Author suggests that beyond 100-120 is careless
Put spaces on both sides of an assignment operator (equals sign)
Don’t put spaces between the function name and the parens
DO put spaces after individual arguments / parameters in a list – shows they are separate
Also use spacing to indicate the precedence of operations – think of spacing in math equations with several parentheses – author calls it out for order of precedence, I actually don’t like this one – I prefer grouping with parens
Lining up variable declarations, names, types – found that it was distracting to the “story” of the code….I agree
Hierarchically lining up code based on it’s scope – super important
Author would sometimes condense multiple lines into one (like a get; set;) eventually set it back for readability (breaking indentation)
What about for PRINT statements in SQL???
while statements – indent the semicolon on the next line…otherwise they’re hidden
Follow the team’s formatting rules…don’t go vigilante
He threw in Uncle Bob’s formatting rules