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by geofft
2732 days ago
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I'm not sure there are many cases where there should be long amounts of expressive code. If you're doing something obvious, you should generally be able to program it concisely, in which case you have a high comment-to-code ratio because the amount of code is low. Sometimes this will be because you're importing an external library to do something, or because you're calling out to an internal library. Sometimes this will be because you found a straightforward implementation. If you're finding yourself writing hundreds of lines of code to do a single obvious task then chances are high you're implementing it poorly (and, specifically, in a way where your defect rate is likely proportional to the number of lines of code). And if you're doing several obvious things, then the point of the code is not to explain what the code is doing, but why it's doing that. What is the business purpose of the code? Which customer cares about this edge case that you're handling, and under what circumstances can you stop handling it? Why did you decide that the common library wouldn't actually work here? If you're converting data from an awful legacy format, why are your ingesters / parsers for the legacy format designed in this way? If you're micro-optimizing for performance, why are the optimizations sound (i.e., why do they accomplish the same thing as the unoptimized version), how do they work, and why did you decide these spots need to be optimized? Each individual thing you do might be obvious on its own, but the arrangement of the whole thing needs comments for each step, which again gives you a high comment-to-code ratio. |
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I just meant simple to understand variable, function, and class names. That combined with small classes and functions, makes following the logic of your program extremely easy.
Following concepts like DRY (don't repeat yourself) and the single responsibility principle ensure that you're making more easily testable code, and I'm sure less overall LOC.