Sanity and Readabilty

Shooting Offense: Unobvious Solution

Shooting Offense: Unobvious Problem

Shooting Offenses

We are all mature programmers, and we all know that some oddities are best rectified by firing the programmer

• Unexpected side effects

• Wrong documentation (none is far better)

• Nested loops to a depth of 10

  • With loop variables taken from somewhere in the middle of the alphabet (Fortran?)

• Obvious lazyness

• Obvious lack of respect for colleagues

Ambiguity

Ambiguity is the root of all evil. Imagine …

• You have to take over maintenance of a large piece of code

• ⟶ you have to understand it

• You cannot guess from its name what a function does

• Same with variables

• Same with parameters

• Return values have no obvious meaning

• There are comments all over, obviously meant to overcome those shortcomings

• Comments are mostly out-of-sync with the code

⟶ This will drive you mad!

• (… especially if it’s your own code)*

Readability

Simple recipe for writing good code: you are able to understand what you did, even after three weeks of holiday/beer

• Chances are others will understand the code too

• Requires some discipline

• ⟶ Handcraft?

Code Smells

Code smells for the following reasons

• Comments that explain how the code works

• Long parameter lists

• Long nested if/else chains

• Hungarian notation

• … and many more

We won’t elaborate on that - this is not a programming course

Following a series of easy techniques to make C code readable/correct

Good reading: here