I’ve had one coworker whose personal coding style actually somewhat resembled that in the Clean Code examples. He wrote functions as small as possible, used many layers of abstraction, and named everything very verbosely and explicitly.
Now, to be fair, I don’t think he did that because of Clean Code, and he also didn’t follow most of the good practices that Martin recommends. Most egregiously, he almost never tested things, even manually (!!). He once worked an entire weekend to finish something that I needed for my part of the project, and when he was done, it didn’t work, because he hadn’t actually run it at any point (!!!).
But even when his software did work, it was horrendous to navigate and modify, specifically because of that style of writing code. I know, because when he retired, I was the only person on the team who could deal with it, so his part of the project fell entirely on me.
Now, I’ve also had to work with code that had the opposite problem: short names, no abstraction. And a sort of “worst of both” codebase where the functions were exceedingly long and full of near-duplicate functionality, but overall there was a fair amount of modularity and abstraction.
But in my opinion, it was much harder to deal with the code that hid all of its weirdness behind layers and layers of abstractions, despite those abstractions being carefully documented and explicitly named.
I hear you, but here’s my experience:
I’ve had one coworker whose personal coding style actually somewhat resembled that in the Clean Code examples. He wrote functions as small as possible, used many layers of abstraction, and named everything very verbosely and explicitly.
Now, to be fair, I don’t think he did that because of Clean Code, and he also didn’t follow most of the good practices that Martin recommends. Most egregiously, he almost never tested things, even manually (!!). He once worked an entire weekend to finish something that I needed for my part of the project, and when he was done, it didn’t work, because he hadn’t actually run it at any point (!!!).
But even when his software did work, it was horrendous to navigate and modify, specifically because of that style of writing code. I know, because when he retired, I was the only person on the team who could deal with it, so his part of the project fell entirely on me.
Now, I’ve also had to work with code that had the opposite problem: short names, no abstraction. And a sort of “worst of both” codebase where the functions were exceedingly long and full of near-duplicate functionality, but overall there was a fair amount of modularity and abstraction.
But in my opinion, it was much harder to deal with the code that hid all of its weirdness behind layers and layers of abstractions, despite those abstractions being carefully documented and explicitly named.