Comment on Linear code is more readable
SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.world 1 year agoThe problem most of these examples and counter examples make is only showing simple code and assuming that you always want to apply the patterns of abstracting things or not.
This is the real problem. Without context of what the project is for we can only speculate on what the “best practice” is. If my problem is that I have a directory with 2000 videos in it, and I need to process all the ones with an English language track, I am going to write a one-off bash script, and not a huge C# project filled with the OO concepts.
But if the method is one of 10,000 needed in a huge project, then sticking with the coding guidelines of the whole project is more important for maintainability. A dev coming in 36 months later who is familiar with the code base would have less problems going through an abstracted setup, just because they have experience with the project and can make assumptions from that.
nous@programming.dev 1 year ago
This can also be a sticky point. When they make sense sure, but sticking to them no matter what can cause more problems. Far too often I have seen some people try to stick with they style/way something was written before because they want to respect the code that was there before or don’t understand why it was done that way. Only to squeeze their solution into it in an awkward way and bend over backwards to get it working right. But if they were to ask the original developer why it was done that way the answer is often just could not think of a better way at the time or I cannot remember any more or seemed like a good idea at the time, but it has not aged well.
Large projects are often layers of changes layered on other changes in additive ways that eventually lead to some very weird and convoluted structures. In those situations I do actually find undoing the layers of abstraction and just inlining all the function calls lets you make some massive simplifications and lets you better see new more robust abstractions you can then apply - things that would never be obvious from the original overly abstract code.